# Question
Title: Persuasion strategies by Cialdini (why is punishment not there?)
Cialdini is famous for his book "Influence" where he talks about various ways to get people to do things you want them to. They are:

* reciprocation
* commitment/consistency
* scarcity
* authority
* liking
* social proof

Should not punishment be included? Or are there soft/hard ways of persuasion, or perhaps short-term/long-term distinction?

I considered maybe punishment is part of authority, but do all forms of authority have additional power to punish? I don't think so. Some are just empty titles/positions. In addition, non-authority figures also have the power to punish, even if it's not legitimized, and as a result an abusive parent or child, or a bully or someone wielding a knife can punish you if you don't do what they say. In addition, the effects of or threat of punishment itself can also last a long time, like many other persuasion/influence strategies.

# Answer
Briefly looking at an article summarizing Cialdini's viewpoints ("The Science and Practice of Persuasion", 2001, free pdf; doi link), he does not include threats of punishment under "authority". By "authority", Cialdini means the status of the influencer, such as being recognized as an expert on the subject-matter.

As far as I can tell, in his book, Cialdini barely tackles punishment directly. The most detailed passage dealing with punishment (as a strategy) seems to be one one child rearing, and even this occurs in a footnote:

> The occurrence of the Romeo and Juliet effect should not be interpreted as a warning to parents to be always accepting of their teenagers’ romantic choices. New players at this delicate game are likely to err often and, consequently, would benefit from the direction of an adult with greater perspective and experience. In providing such direction, parents should recognize that teenagers, who see themselves as young adults, will not respond well to control attempts that are typical of parent-child relationships. Especially in the clearly adult arena of mating, adult tools of influence (preference and persuasion) will be more effective than traditional **forms of parental control (prohibitions and punishments)**. Although the experience of the Montague and Capulet families is an extreme example, heavy-handed restrictions on a young romantic alliance may well turn it clandestine, torrid, and sad.

So he does include punishment at least under "parental control"... which I don't know where exactly it fits in Cialdini's ontology. Cialdini's book is very narrative with a lot of anecdotes, but he does not engage in a lot of systematization (beyond the chapter-level one which you've mentioned in your question). But from that passage he does seem to consider persuasion as *not* encompassing punishment. This is a fairly purist view, as I further detail below from the (review) perspective of other authors.

You are correct that other authors (in contrast) do consider punishment as form of persuasion, particularly in legal contexts. Quoting the SEP page on legal punishment:

> However, an obvious and crucial question faces any such justification of punishment as a communicative enterprise. Censure can be communicated through a formal conviction in a criminal court; or it could be communicated by some further formal denunciation issued by a judge or some other representative of the legal community, or by a system of purely symbolic punishments which were burdensome only in virtue of their censorial meaning. It can, of course, also be communicated by ‘hard treatment’ punishments of the kinds imposed by our courts — by imprisonment, by compulsory community service, by fines and the like, which are burdensome independently of their censorial meaning (on ‘hard treatment’, see Feinberg 1970): but why should we choose such methods of communication, rather than methods that do not involve hard treatment (see Christie 1981: 98–105)? Is it because they will make the communication more effective (see Falls 1987; Primoratz 1989; Kleinig 1991)? But why is it so important to make the communication effective — and is there not a serious danger that the hard treatment will conceal, rather than highlight, the moral censure it should communicate (see Mathiesen 1990: 58–73)?
>
> One sort of answer to this question explains penal hard treatment as an essential aspect of the enterprise of moral communication itself. **Punishment, on this view, should aim not merely to communicate censure to the offender, but to *persuade* the offender to recognise and repent the wrong he has done, and so to recognise the need to reform himself and his future conduct, and to make apologetic reparation to those whom he wronged.** His punishment then constitutes a kind of secular penance that he is required to undergo for his crime: its hard treatment aspects, the burden it imposes on him, should serve both to assist the process of repentance and reform, by focusing his attention on his crime and its implications, and as a way of making the apologetic reparation that he owes (see Duff 2001, 2011; see also Garvey 1999, 2003; Tudor 2001; Bennett 2008; for a sophisticated discussion see Tasioulas 2006). This type of account faces serious objections (see Bickenbach 1988; Ten 1990; von Hirsch 1999; Bagaric and Amarasekara 2000; von Hirsch and Ashworth 2005, ch. 7): in particular that it cannot show penal hard treatment to be a necessary aspect of a communicative enterprise which is still to respect offenders as responsible and rational agents who must be left free to remain unpersuaded; that apologetic reparation must be voluntary if it is to be of any real value; and that a liberal state should not take this kind of intrusive interest in its citizens’ moral characters.

From that I gather that it is controversial whether punishment can be considered true persuasion though, i.e. some other authors disagree.

I suspect that in psychological terms, those who argue for punishment as persuasion are behaviorists, in that they don't care what's going on in the mind of the punished as long as the desired outcome (e.g. non reoffending) happens. On the other hand, cognitivists would probably argue that if the outcome does not also include the target internalizing/adopting the viewpoint (that is being communicated) then it is not actual persuasion, but mere compliance-- a sort of machiavellian behavior basically. An exam flashcard says:

> What is the difference between persuasion and compliance gaining?
>
> Persuasion is a change in attitudes, beliefs and values whereas compliance gaining is focused on changing behavior, getting someone to do what you want.

That's probably based on some intro 101 book. The research monograph by Seiter and Gass (*Perspectives on Persuasion*) has a three-page table with definitions of persuasion by various authors... and they don't really agree. Seiter and Gass have their own view (of course):

> Our position is that many of the definitional vagaries can be clarified, if not resolved. by focusing on two considerations. The first is whether a given scholar or researcher is attempting to define "pure" persuasion- what Simons (1986) and O'Keefe (1990) have labeled "paradigm" cases of persuasion-versus all of persuasion, including its periphery. which we term "borderline" cases of persuasion, By pure persuasion. we refer to clear-cut cases on which almost all scholars in communication and related disciplines would agree. As examples. nearly everyone would include a presidential debate, a television commercial. or an attorney's closing remarks to a jury as instances of persuasion. Other instances. though, lie closer to the boundary of what we normally think of as persuasion. Not everyone would agree that a derelict's mere appearance "persuades" passersby to keep their distance. Nor would everyone agree that when city planners install speed bumps on a street where speeding is common. they are "persuading" motorists to slow down. Such cases are less clear-cut. Much of the disparity in definitions. then. is rooted in the fact that some scholars and researchers are concerned with "pure" persuasion. whereas others are concerned with borderline cases as well.

Comparing this summary with the passage from Cialdini's book I cited in the beginning, it seems clear enough to me Cialdini was/is preferring (or at least implicitly using) a "pure" definition of persuasion.

Seiter and Gass also have a textbook (with a similar title but less research oriented), which repeats their view form their monographs, augmented with a pretty illustration (well, the illustration is present in the monograph as well):

As you can see the "coercive" form of persuasion, which would include punishment (or at least the threat thereof) is in the borderline bin/area. And in the textbook they further drive that point with a cartoon:

accompanied by an elaboration that coercion and persuasion lie on a continuum, and that pure forms are rarely encountered in everyday life experiences:

> we would suggest that most influence attempts we encounter in daily life include both persuasive and coercive elements. Rarely in life is one free to make a a completely unfettered choice. There are almost always strings attached. This is particularly true of face-to-face encounters. If a friend asks to borrow 20 bucks, we can say "no," but there may be relational consequences for declining.
>
> Rarely, too, are influence attempts completely coercive. For example, holding a gun to another person's head would seem to be an obvious example of coercion. We readily admit that this situation is *primarily* coercive. But what if the victim doesn't believe the gun is loaded? Or what if the victim thinks the threatener is bluffing? To be successful, a thread--even a threat of violence--must be perceived as credible. Thus, even in what might see like a clear-cut case of coercion there are persuasive elements at work. And conversely, even in what appear to be cut-and-dried cases of persuasion, there may be coercive features operating. In out view, the isn't so much *whether* a situation is persuasive or coercive as *how* persuasive or coercive the situation is. \[emphasis in original\].
> 1 votes

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Tags: social-psychology, persuasion
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# Question
Title: Subliminal Persuasion: best chances of success
A lot of people are skeptic about the impact of subliminal messages. Good research and experiments on this topic are hard to find.

Therefore, I want to execute an experiment on this topic. To do this right, I'm curious what the best ways are to influence someone's decision making via subliminal messages / priming.

Does anyone have experience or helpful research that will increase the chance of successfully persuading people subliminally in my experiment?

# Answer
> 2 votes
For the sake of "Hail Mary" answers: there's a recent (2016) paper by Ruch et al. claiming unprecedented results:

> Subliminal influence did not significantly decay if probed after 25 versus 15 min. This is unprecedented evidence of the longevity and impact of subliminal messages on conscious, rational decision-making.

You could try to replicate their experiment(s).

# Answer
> 0 votes
*Edited:* Making sure to make a path of trailing the information to the commons that is able to redirect from the beginning point as subliminal, i.e. I have reported there is a location point where to find the hidden message then to another hidden spot where the message resides then the person gets the message and can claim a reward. If you can find that person who can follow these then these are the queues of seeing how willingly the effort comes along with it then can have another person who is in good connection with the person and try to see if he/she picks up the information without looking consciously, and grab information from the person that's connected too. All in all, it's trial and error for an individual person and it takes a lot of time and patience. This is all just an idea.

They could also be on some particular substance or have higher knowledge along with coordination and balance with the psych. They may remain unconsciously knowing something is particularly there; it’s very hard to pick up the sensibility in which, is a very hard deal to break through to find the right person. It is in fact very wise to keep things subliminal as possible to find the subliminal person because it attracts them and to remain subliminal. Once you find the particular one that seem to be unconscious of but really is consciously aware. The person doesn't have to say what or look at your body but in their possible peripheral vision. Sometimes you just can't rule it out, some are just too good to be true; some are way too good to be true. It's in some sort of higher intelligence to think before they react. And typically intuitive personage are capable of this but not all are good responders/followers. **\*1**

> Also it's like a person has trained itself into a unconcious and sub concious state to not react. But is conciously able to react as if it were internally.

As for a matter of fact I have for a very long time didn't hear a sound until the age of 3 then picked up on hearing. This has made me become effective at my picking up skills in a very correct way. I started formulating my own hand signs to my parents until they have found I was deaf. I was typically not recognizing my hearing senses so it allowed me to balance my sense over sight vs hearing. **\*2**

**\*1** https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200705/gut-almighty

**\*2** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prelingual\_deafness

*Added:* I’m sorry I've lost track in the post about the autism part scratch that. Lost senses from the early age 'till the age of 3 are capable of mastering to accommodate the other senses to a heightened level. The overall senses of the brain is training itself to accommodate the loss senses. Such as like the (anti-)phantom sense, possibly become the 6th sense. I.e a person with lost sense regain it’s natural balance. I can relate to this book. It's in .PDF format **\*3**

Your brain changes with every experience: every sight, every sound, every touch, every thought, every emotion. It then interprets future experiences based on the past experiences. But a person with hearing disability can't pick up the subliminal messages as well as near perfect hearing. **\*4**

Autism puts things together in a complex puzzle.**\*5**

So with this attributed with number *\*3* & number *\*2*. It can put all the puzzles together and fills in the missing puzzles as a dummy puzzle to accommodate then this goes back to number *\*1*

I tried to render this question for the right answer as rational as possible lol, I sense there is something there but not quite understood right. It is a plugin and play kind of deal with there are other things I can recognize is there but there's no way how I can precisely explain or to even convey in this language. It's an onomatopoeia along with transpositioning the language involved and it may seem irrational when really it's rational. Trying to keep all of this rational as possible.

**\*3** http://richardlouv.com/images/uploads/excerpt-the-nature-principle-richard-louv.pdf

**\*4** http://ilslearningcorner.com/2015-06-the-age-when-your-childs-brain-stops-learning/

**\*5** http://childdevelopmentinfo.com/child-psychology/autism-aspergers/

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Tags: perception, decision-making, priming
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# Question
Title: Innate personality tests: do they exist? If not, why?
A personality is developed by innate factors and by the things that happen in your life, but how would your personality be if you either had received the same amount of positive and negative stimuli from those, or if your stimuli from those influences had always been neutral? How would you be?

**I'd like to know if tests of innate personality exist, and if not, why not.** I think this could be helpful in some psychological treatments. If a person has depression, I think that the treatment should be different if that person has an innate tendency to be depressive, as opposed to if he or she is depressive because a lot of things have made him or her depressive. I think these types of tests would be worth trying to develop, though they might be difficult to do. Thanks for your time.

# Answer
A useful model for topics like this comes from McCrae and Costa (1999): There's quite a lot more going on here than is pertinent to your question, but note that influences originate from biological bases on the top left, and from external influences on the upper right. Everything else is modeled as an effect of mediated, dynamic processes between these two...except basic tendencies. McCrae and Costa's theory claims that "basic tendencies" such as the Big Five are in fact those aspects of innate personality you'd probably want to test: truly innate, and separable from external influences. However, McCrae and Costa (2003) themselves had to back off of this claim somewhat and present a more qualified model, so the goal remains elusive by practically all accounts.

Behavioral genetics is making a lot of progress in sorting out what's definitionally innate, but there's a lot of progress left to make. Half of the progress is in discovering the complexities that explain why simpler theories don't work as often as we'd like. Dealing with those complexities is another matter in itself. I agree that tests of genetic factors that influence behavior are very valuable, and far too few at present, but we're definitely working on it.

Another approach that's making a lot of progress on the experiential side is cross-cultural psychology. The story is much the same as with behavioral genetics: our access to the methods for investigating these influences is growing rapidly, hence so are our understandings of both the questions and answers. Ask again in another decade and we'll have much more to tell you than we do right now.

@Ana raises a great point that complicates matters quite a bit: gene-environment interaction. So much of who we're born as determines how we interact with our parents, and whether we choose to be like them or different. Choices of identity thus reflect both our genetic heritage and our environmental interactions. Genetic influences even affect whether we experience given stimuli as positive or negative, and then go on to influence how we choose to react. Over time, it becomes very difficult to separate environmental influences from innate influences, because our choices shape who we are, and our identities become innate in many ways too. Another useful term in this vein of theory is *reciprocal determinism*, which refers to this sort of bidirectional causality we see between innate and environmental factors in development.

In my limited experience teaching on these topics, I've found some particular examples of reciprocal determinism especially illustrative of both the complexity of the problem and the degree of progress we've made. Two worth offering here are as follows:

* Monoamine oxidase A (MAO-A) is sensitive to genetic variation that decreases its concentration in the body. MAO-A deficiency increases stress vulnerability (or *diathesis*: see another answer of mine for another example of the diathesis-stress model) in terms of the likelihood of aggressive maladaptation (Brunner, Nelen, Breakefield, Ropers, & van Oost, 1993). In children born with the gene that leads to MAO-A deficiency, a stressful environment such as one involving child abuse will be very likely to cause antisocial behavior in those children later in their lives, whereas children without MAO-A deficiencies tend to withstand such stressful environments better (Caspi et al., 2002). Furthermore, aggressive tendencies are much more similar regardless of MAO-A levels when childhood environments aren't so stressful. Thus one could test for the relevant gene to identify an innate vulnerability to aggressive maladaptation, but whether a person with genetic risk would see that risk realized would remain to be determined by the environment.
* Genetic variation may also determine the environment at a cultural level to some extent. This is where the worlds of behavioral genetics and cross-cultural psychology play very well together. An example of why we really need tons of research in both and cross-pollination between their respective theories arises in the "A118G single nucleotide polymorphism of the mu-opioid receptor gene (OPRM1)," which, first of all, relates to pain sensitivity (Fillingim et al., 2005). The global cultural relevance emerges clearly in this figure (Way & Lieberman, 2010):  Bear in mind that this is correlational evidence though; hence it's also worth considering whether cultures in these areas could've selected certain alleles like A118G over the course of history. A great many factors powerfully influence cultures besides genes, after all (Diamond, 1998; see for a book review Venkatachalam, 2001).
* The 5-HTTLPR gene may relate to innate tendencies toward anxiety, but doesn't seem to relate consistently (Ebstein, 2006). Culture may have something to do with this (Chiao & Blizinsky, 2009):

+ Top left: collectivism (vs. individualism), from low in yellow to high in red
    + Top right: frequency of the anxiety-prone allele of 5-HTTLPR
    + Bottom left and right: prevalence of anxiety and mood disorders, respectively

These maps demonstrate that despite the much higher genetic vulnerability to anxiety in China vs. USA (top right), anxiety and mood disorders appear to have much lower prevalences there than here (speaking as an American myself; see the bottom two maps). Chiao and Blizinsky argue that the higher genetic vulnerability to anxiety in China might've led to a collectivist culture there through a coevolutionary process of cultural adaptation to an ethnically linked genetic predisposition. It's an interesting argument that these innate factors could actually lead to such a strong compensatory shift in culture that the innate influence would be not only dwarfed, but reversed. As to whether that's a falsifiable theory, on the other hand...You'd probably want to read and judge for yourself; I get a little fuzzy on the details here. I suppose I make a decent example of how hard it is to keep up with theoretical advances like these though.

Aside from all that, understanding how personality develops is tricky enough already without trying to separate genetic from environmental factors. There's a rich history of debate on the degree to which stable personalities even exist, and the general consensus now is that they do, but reaching this conclusion took a lot of work (see the person–situation debate), much of which is far from settled in the details. Personality does change over time, but subtly, and with resistance – a useful simile is that personality sets like plaster over time (Srivastava, John, Gosling, & Potter, 2003).

**References**

<sup>\- Brunner, H. G., Nelen, M., Breakefield, X. O., Ropers, H. H., & Van Oost, B. A. (1993). Abnormal behavior associated with a point mutation in the structural gene for monoamine oxidase A. *Science, 262*(5133), 578–580. Retrieved from http://www.bioforensics.com/conference07/DNA\_and\_behavior/Abnormal\_behavior.pdf.
\- Caspi, A., McClay, J., Moffitt, T. E., Mill, J., Martin, J., Craig, I. W., Taylor, A., & Poulton, R. (2002). Role of genotype in the cycle of violence in maltreated children. *Science, 297*(5582), 851–854. Retrieved from http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/uploads/documents/Caspi1.pdf.
\- Chiao, J. Y., & Blizinsky, K. D. (2010). Culture–gene coevolution of individualism–collectivism and the serotonin transporter gene. *Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 277*(1681), 529–537. Retrieved from http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/277/1681/529.full.html.
\- Diamond, J. M. (1998). *Guns, germs and steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years*. Random House.
\- Ebstein, R. P. (2006). The molecular genetic architecture of human personality: beyond self-report questionnaires. *Molecular Psychiatry, 11*(5): 427–445. Retrieved from www.nature.com/mp/journal/v11/n5/full/4001814a.html.
\- Fillingim, R. B., Kaplan, L., Staud, R., Ness, T. J., Glover, T. L., Campbell, C. M., ... & Wallace, M. R. (2005). The A118G single nucleotide polymorphism of the μ-opioid receptor gene (*OPRM1*) is associated with pressure pain sensitivity in humans. *The Journal of Pain, 6*(3), 159–167.
\- McCrae, R. R., & Costa Jr, P. T. (1999). A five-factor theory of personality. *Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research, 2*, 139–153.
\- McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T. (2003). *Personality in adulthood: A five-factor theory perspective*. Guilford Press.
\- Srivastava, S., John, O. P., Gosling, S. D., & Potter, J. (2003). Development of personality in early and middle adulthood: set like plaster or persistent change? *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84*(5), 1041–1053. Retrieved from http://j.b5z.net/i/u/2043019/i/PersonalityDevelopmentInAdults.pdf.
\- Venkatachalam, S. (2001). Guns, germs and steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years. *Resonance*, 84–88. Retrieved from http://www.ias.ac.in/resonance/Volumes/06/01/0084-0088.pdf.
\- Way, B. M., & Lieberman, M. D. (2010). Is there a genetic contribution to cultural differences? Collectivism, individualism and genetic markers of social sensitivity. *Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 5*(2–3), 203–211. Retrieved from http://www.replicatedtypo.com/science/genetic-components-and-cultural-differences-the-social-sensitivity-hypothesis/1620/.</sup>
> 11 votes

# Answer
The only thing that presently qualifies for a "test of innate personality" is to sequence the subject's genome and look for genes (SNPs actually) with known relevance for personality. However, since it turned out that personality is just as polygenic as psychiatric disorders (quite in contrast to what some hoped 20 years ago), meaning many genes of small effect add up, you can't just point to one gene or another and proclaim "Evrika!". Instead, the best known method currently is to compute a genomic profile risk scoring (PRS). (There's more than one way to do this.)

And it so happens that Neuroticism is (presently) the best studied trait in this respect (for rather obvious reasons; your motivation for asking this in relation to depression is also that of many researchers, given the high economic cost of depression for society.) But even for neuroticism the results are not that great, and hardly of any clinical value. For instance;

* one 2016 study by Smith et al. study could predict 1% of neuroticism variance
* a study published in Dec. 2017 study by Luciano et al. could predict 2.79% of neuroticism and 0.8% of current depression status (it's oddly not mentioned in its abstract, just in the full text.)
* the largest study (sample) and the best result to date is from Nagel et al. who could predict 4.2% of of neuroticism. (This study has yet to appear in a peer-reviewed publication, but it has been cited by some reviews already, e.g. by Sanchez-Roige et al. (2017).)

But interestingly enough, even though the prediction power is low, one can use such scoring to study how the genes and environment interact. This was done in a 2017 study by Domingue et al. looking longitudinally at the depression (symptoms) score of old subjects before and after the death of their spouse, and correlating with the polygenic risk scores (three different such scores, but I only reproduce two below; the third one looked the same).

The subjects here are stratified in high an low risk groups by one standard deviation of the polygenic score (up or down) from the mean. Alas, despite the cool graphs and statistically significant prediction by polygenic scores of the depression difference between groups at interesting points in time, the clinical relevance is basically zero. In the authors' own words:

> Clinically, genetic testing based on current knowledge is unlikely to be useful in planning for or managing bereavement. Effect sizes in our study were too small to be useful for predicting outcomes of individual patients.

There are some fundamental limitations the way the polygenic scores are currently computed, stemming from the way the sequencing is done (GWAS); basically only additive effects of SNPs can be accounted for. This excludes both rare variations in genes, and some generic mechanisms (dominance, epistasis) from consideration.
> 2 votes

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Tags: developmental-psychology, personality, test
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# Question
Title: Why is Biological plausibility in Machine Learning important?
I have found that many authors of machine learning papers, that employ the *Hebbian learning* rule, refer to the **biological plausibility of it**, as one of the arguments to use it instead of the well known back-propagation algorithm (Whittington & Bogacz, 2017;Pugh, Soltoggio, & Stanley, 2014; Burms, Caluwaerts, & Dambre, 2015) (*I imagine the same argument is used for other biologically plausible algorithms*).

But why, in actual fact, is biological plausibility important in the first place? Why do so many sources qoute such argument, and what are the advantages of biological plausibility, when related to machine learning applications?

I have searched a lot, but haven't really seen anyone answer this specifically.

# Answer
> 2 votes
They're mentioning biological plausibility, because they think biological constraints are important for intelligent systems. Also, biologically constrained systems could be easily applied to understanding the brain. Whether biological plausibility is important or not to developing intelligent systems and understanding the brain is a matter of debate.

On one hand, there's the argument that since the brain is the only form of intelligence we know, we should probably imitate it to develop intelligent systems. Also, at the same time, we would learn to understand the brain!

On the other hand, there's the often-repeated argument that we did not get airplanes from imitating birds, but from understanding the principles of aerodynamics. In turn, the principles of aerodynamics were then applied to bird wings and feathers.

For better introduction to this debate applied to understanding the brain and creating scalable intelligence, try reading "Marr's Attacks: On Reductionism and Vagueness" by Eliasmith et al.

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Tags: neuroscience, learning, neural-network, plasticity
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# Question
Title: How distantly related are research in computational neuroscience and neural networks/machine learning?
If one is more interested in understanding how algorithms in the biological brain solve problems (theoretically, particularly the mathematical aspect), and possibly in building brain-inspired computation (applied theory, particularly neurorobotics), then is it suggested to focus more on studying computational neuroscience rather than artificial neural nets/machine learning? It seems the latter one is more oriented toward any algorithms just to solve problems via computer simulations without the constraints of biological brains, though there are still large areas for theory of machine learning and artificial neural nets.

# Answer
> 4 votes
Computational neuroscience and neural networks are both studied on this MSc at the University of Sussex. When I took the course in 2004/5, the Neural Networks module was compulsory, and the Computational Neuroscience was optional in the 2nd semester, so that would suggest the course designers (world leaders in biologically inspired computing) thought that studying neural networks first might aid the study of computational neuroscience. I think some of the other subjects taught on the course would be of interest to you, e.g. evolving genetic algorithms for robot control (see Rodney Brooks – and the iRobot corporation).

Lastly to answer the question(!), I think you probably need some understanding of (simple) neural networks (artificial or otherwise) to understand more in-depth concepts in computational neuroscience.

# Answer
> 2 votes
Neural networks constitute one (very important) level of organization that is modelled computationally in brain research. Computational neuroscience attempts to make these as biologically realistic as possible, often creating models that operate at multiple levels, such as having the neural networks exhibit electrochemical dynamics \- something that is obviously not the goal of standard machine learning research. Thus, in a sense, studying computational neuroscience will necessarily make you more of an expert in artificial neural networks than studying machine learning ever will. The type of neural networks used in machine learning are much too basic to explain the brain. However, machine learning texts could give you insight into, well, how information about the environment could potentially be saved in the brain. Computational neuroscience as a field is still in its infancy, especially what concerns modelling learning in the brain. Even Chris Eliasmith's spiking neural network model Spaun (which is quite impressive!) has been criticized by Henry Markram (the guy that got 1 billion Euro from the EU for the Human Brain Project) for being biologically unrealistic. In short, you won't get around the basic ANN theory in studying computational neuroscience, and you will expand on it significantly in biological terms. However, you might want to check out machine learning texts to see how neural networks could possibly store patterns.

# Answer
> 1 votes
Not very related insofar, unfortunately. While the original inspiration for artificial neural networks (ANN) was biological, most of the subsequent progress in ANNs for what is called "machine learning", which is usually concerned with optimizing some function, came from mathematical insights that were not based in biology; quoting Marblestone et al.(2016):

> The artificial neural networks now prominent in machine learning were, of course, originally inspired by neuroscience (McCulloch and Pitts, 1943). While neuroscience has continued to play a role (Cox and Dean, 2014), many of the major developments were guided by insights into the mathematics of efficient optimization, rather than neuroscientific findings (Sutskever and Martens, 2013). The field has advanced from simple linear systems (Minsky and Papert, 1972), to nonlinear networks (Haykin, 1994), to deep and recurrent networks (LeCun et al., 2015; Schmidhuber, 2015). Backpropagation of error (Werbos, 1974, 1982; Rumelhart et al., 1986) enabled neural networks to be trained efficiently, by providing an efficient means to compute the gradient with respect to the weights of a multi-layer network. Methods of training have improved to include momentum terms, better weight initializations, conjugate gradients and so forth, evolving to the current breed of networks optimized using batch-wise stochastic gradient descent. These developments have little obvious connection to neuroscience.

Marblestone (who is an AI researcher) and colleagues do argue (in fact this is the point of their article) that

> however, that neuroscience and machine learning are again ripe for convergence

Their list of arguments is fairly long and I'll certainly not do them justice here, but for instance they cite a recent paper proposing to explain that Hebbian plasticity is a form of optimization:

> Often these types of local self-organization can also be viewed as optimizing a cost function: for example, certain forms of Hebbian plasticity can be viewed as extracting the principal components of the input, which minimizes a reconstruction error (Pehlevan and Chklovskii, 2015).

Marblestone et al. dedicate a substantial amount of their paper reviewing fairly recent work that has attempt to pinpoint backpropagation (a key method for ANN's success in optimization) in the brain. The list of hypotheses how backpropagation might happen in the brain is pretty long, alas, so I won't review them here; I'm just pointing to a few papers and talks Hinton (2016); Liao (2015) that examine how backpropagation is (or isn't) related to biological neworks or which even propose biologically inspired alternatives to be used in ANNs, e.g. Balduzzi (2014).

Another issue that Marblestone et al. cover in depth is how cost functions might be represented in the brain. And this meshes in with how memories and goals are represented in the brain. This is obviously a vast area of research. Since the deep biology papers are generally beyond my pay grade, I'll just point to a recent paper (highlighted by Marblestone) proposing that a "Naïve Utility Calculus" underlies much of "Commonsense Psychology"; Jara-Ettinger et. al (2016).

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Tags: theoretical-neuroscience, computational-modeling, neural-network
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# Question
Title: What is the relationship between rejection sensitive dysphoria and ADHD?
I discovered something called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD). If you google it, the first page will show pages that talk about it in relation to ADHD.

What is it about ADHD that causes "nearly everyone with" it to have RSD?

Someone might say that ADHD people would not be sensitive to rejection because they have too many thoughts unless they're hyperfocused on such rejection.

RSD sounds like something related to anxiety rather than attention deficiency or hyperactivity. So someone may suspect that RSD belongs to people with anxiety, depression, bipolar or people with a personality disorder like borderline or narcissistic rather than to people with ADHD. I really can't think of a connection between RSD and ADHD.

# Answer
Upon closer examination, it appears that Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria is a term that was coined by Dr. William Dodson to describe the phenomenon of rejection sensitivity in ADHD sufferers. It does not appear to be a 'valid' term, in the sense that there is no DSM definition. In fact, it seems that Dodson himself is the only one to have used the term. Dodson specializes in adult ADHD, and so it makes sense that the only articles associated with the term would pertain to ADHD.

As for the phenomenon of rejection sensitivity itself, note the definition of dysphoria as follows: "a state of feeling unwell or unhappy; a feeling of emotional and mental discomfort as a symptom of discontentment, restlessness, dissatisfaction, malaise, depression, anxiety or indifference."

In a broader sense, these are issues associated with chemical imbalances -- as is ADHD. One could even describe ADHD as its own dysphoria. It is also quite common for other disorders to coexist alongside ADHD, particularly anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and bipolar disorder. This -- coupled with the fact that children with ADHD often find themselves socially isolated -- may be responsible for a higher prevalence of rejection sensitivity in those with the disorder.

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The following is an edit by the OP, Jack Bauer.

Dodson likely did not coin the term RSD, but he might have been the first to use it with ADHD. It has been used in relation to borderline people:
> 8 votes

# Answer
You might want to look at
Bondü, R. & Esser, G. Eur Child Adolesc Psychiatry (2015) 24: 185. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00787-014-0560-9

The authors found fairly compelling evidence of a latent construct of rejection sensitivity associated with ADHD in a large (\>1200) German sample of adolescents. This existed independently of another interesting construct, justice sensitivity, which is also higher in young people with ADHD.

As to whether or not there is an overlap between rejection sensitivity and what Donald Klein described in 1979, it is possible. However, it seems that many authors from the 1980s onward have believed that Klein's groups were probably people with Borderline Personalities or a variety of bipolar spectrum problems. Klein seems to have found good treatment results with MA0-inhibitors, which are often used off-label for ADHD. So, perhaps he was unknowingly tapping into a subgroup of ADHD patients.
> 6 votes

# Answer
Dodson distinguishes "RSD" from social anxiety in that the latter begins as an anticipatory fear and is generally lessened upon social interaction whereas the RSD flare-ups begin as in-the-moment perceptions of an important social rejection and have emotional consequences that unfold from there. (See this slideshow and accompanying video.)

I do not believe that the sensitivity would result from social isolation. I am not sure we know that social isolation prevails for people with ADHD, but Dodson and the Dr. below believe that rejection sensitivity does. You'll find any number of studies indicating the strong evidence for genetic influence on ADHD in families (see this, that, and the other).

While Dodson seems to be the only one to use this term with ADHD, Gabor Mate, in his book *Scattered*, makes basically the same connection between ADHD and intense pain on perception of attachment rejection. He even goes so far as to suggest that hypersensitivity is the *actually* genetic component that predisposes certain infants/children to develop ADHD.
> 4 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, abnormal-psychology, personality, adhd, personality-disorder
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# Question
Title: What is it called to think without language? Are there studies around it?
I think there are two types of thinking: with and without language.

For my entire life, in my opinion, I have always thought without language. Some people say it's impossible and that we think with language without knowing it. But the fact is that I can distinguish them pretty well.

Reading the answers on https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/questions/5462/is-it-possible-to-think-without-language I see that the answers focus on other "senses thinking". By this I mean, the answers focus on other forms of communication that we have, turned into thinking, such as, thinking based on images, sounds, etc. But in my opinion those are just "tools for thinking", they are just something like super rapid accesses on memory to rationalize things and not the real source of "thinking".

So here I am, stuck on "What is this thinking process? How does it happen? It just looks like magic."

If you ask me to describe it, I would say it is a weird mix of--well, I can't even explain it. I just have some perception of the mix of things received from memory like something operating on memory really, really fast.

I am very slow and bad at thinking with language which results in big difficulties in explaining anything. I feel language is like putting what we have in so many dimensions into a single one like taking a colorful picture with a sense of depth and turning it into a flat black and white image.

Does anyone know any studies done on this? What is this weird form of thinking? It's hard in terms of communications, but it's awesome to feel things intensely.

Please remember I am really talking about this "weird thinking" and not confusing it with feelings.

# Answer
Well, obviously it's called non-verbal thought, and its most researched sub-topic appears to be visual thinking.

In general, questions like are there papers about X are frowned upon when the choice of answers is large, as it happens to be in this case, but I'll still point out one recent paper, Amit et al. (2017), using neroimmaging which has an interesting (even if somewhat obvious) hypothesis at the end of its abstract:

> Humans rely on at least two modes of thought: verbal (inner speech) and visual (imagery). Are these modes independent, or does engaging in one entail engaging in the other? \[...\] An asymmetry was observed between inner speech and visual imagery. In particular, inner speech was engaged to a greater extent during verbal than visual thought, but visual imagery was engaged to a similar extent during both modes of thought. Thus, it appears that people generate more robust verbal representations during deliberate inner speech compared to when their intent is to visualize. However, they generate visual images regardless of whether their intent is to visualize or to think verbally. One possible interpretation of these results is that visual thinking is somehow primary, given the relatively late emergence of verbal abilities during human development and in the evolution of our species.

Some linguists, particulary those who support the strong Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (which posists that language determines thought) will probably be livid after reading this paper... I for one am a little skeptical of the generalizability of Amit's findings because of the limited set of experiments his group performed. I'm quite curious what neuroimaging has to say about the brain activation of mathematicians who work in really abstract areas of mathematics; do they also have visual aids popping in their head all the time during their work? And what about the congenitally blind? It's known they have a capacity for mental imagery, but that it is more limited than that of the non-blind. What's the brain activation pattern when the congenitally blind think?

And if the above sounds too abstract, Laura Otis has a blog entry with some vignettes of how some people self-describe their visual thinking process. She also cites some published studies supporting the idea that there is not just one mode of visual thinking, i.e. there is heterogeneity in "visual thinking styles"; this claim is mostly based on the work of Maria Kozhevnikov and her colleagues e.g. 2005, 2010a, 2010b.

And I'm not sure to what extent producing music counts as thought, but a neuroimaging study of musicians who improvise interactively as form of musical dialogue (Donnay et al. 2104) found activation in syntactic but not in semantic areas of the brain regions responsible for processing language.
> 3 votes

# Answer
I think you can definately think of a concept without having the words to explain it, I do it all the time and it sucks, because I cant remember well, or explain to others what the thought was, but I do know it didn't have words because It would have said so much in such a succinct manner that it would be impossible to describe.

Obviously you can think without language, that shouldn't even be a question, i mean we had to think to invent language in the first place.

as for thinking in images and sounds:

I do think its possible that we think based on sensory input and simply can't recognize it as such by the time it is in our consciousness, but I think the answer that you are looking for is " what is the origin of thought?" and that I do not know.
> 1 votes

# Answer
There is a lotta good stuff out there, I'll give you one that outlines one line of thought (no pun...) on your general question: Tomasello's "A Natural History of Human Thinking".

It's a book, so even though it isn't exactly beach reading, it provides a unique view of the development of both thought and language (not that it is going to fill in all of the gaps of this rather large story).
> 1 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, perception, memory, terminology
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# Question
Title: (Why) Do US studies of violence and mental illness tend to report no link but European studies seem to find one?
Studying the link between mental illness and violence seems a sure way to

1. get attention from the mass media, and
2. contradict some other study, and not necessarily one published that long ago.

A pretty old review (and not in some high impact venue) by Stuart (2003) seems to me to still hold water 15 years later with respect to a few general observations:

> Definitive statements are difficult to make and it is equally possible to find recent literature supporting the conclusions that the mentally ill are no more violent, they are as violent, or they are more violent than their nonmentally ill counterparts. \[...\]
>
> Because of the significant methodological challenges faced by researchers in this field, the nature of this association remains unclear. For example, violence has been difficult to measure directly, so that researchers have often relied on official documentation or uncorroborated selfreports. The prevalence of violence has been demonstrated to differ dramatically depending on the source. \[...\]

And it goes on to talk about confounders as the perennial problem of epidemiological studies.

Stuart also highlights a (highly cited) US-sample study of the "no-link" variety (at least if substance-abuse is controlled for), Steadman et al. 1998 ... and I certainly found some newer ones myself, Elbogen & Johnson (2009) or Anderson et al. 2012, just to mention some picked up by the press.

On the other hand, the Oxford group of Fazel has been publishing study after study on European samples including on Sweden (2015) or UK, Finland and Netherlands (2017) that do find a link between depression and violence... and these have also been picked up the press. There are older studies in Scandinavian countries which concur; Hodgins et al. (1996) for instance.

So is this a trend? And (the really tough question) is there a meta-analysis of such studies that does moderator analysis (e.g. by meta-regression) to determine which study parameters matter most with respect to the finding? Is it the case that the Europeans are less violent overall so that the "inherent" violence of the mentally ill "stands out" in Europe but "gets lost in the noise" of the higher society violence in the US? (It certainly is the case the US is more violent than Sweden.) Or is it some other factor that is dominant, e.g. is depression more conductive to violence than other forms of severe mental illness (makes sense to ask since 2 of 3 US studies I've looked at aggregate severe mental illnesses — SMIs). To give you an example of the kind of meta-analysis I'm hoping to find, for ADHD prevalence it seemed that there might be geographical differences between US and Europe, but they turned out to be methodological.

---

I found a paper by Van Dorn et al. (2012) reanalyzing the same data as Elbogen & Johnson, and coming to a European-style conclusion of a link between SMI and violence. The difference in methodology came down (in this case) to:

> important is spatio-temporal contiguity (i.e., the causal factor must be spatially near the effect).

So merely lifetime SMI prevalence wasn't a good predictor but recent symptoms (within 12 months) were. That and the fact that the control group of Elbogen & Johnson apparently was not clean enough (of substance abusers) apparently tipped the scales.

But Eblogen didn't quote concede the field, and in a 2016 study on the exact same data (using 12 months window this time) but with more attention to confounders... found again in favor of their original findings:

> Mediation analyses informed by the I3 model revealed that the positive association between SMI and violence was by and large indirect. Statistically controlling for impellance and disinhibition completely wiped out any positive relationship between SMI and violence.

This is somewhat similar result to what Anderson et al. (2012) obtained on different data after controlling for impulsivity and "present orientation" (using just two simple questions for these two factors!)

# Answer
> 1 votes
I have been away from here for a while as I have been concentrating on my University studies, however, I have just come back and boy have I come back at an opportune moment. Your question showed a lot of research whilst being put together and this is an interesting topic of discussion as I have been discussing the subject of mental illness and violence myself with a couple of friends.

As you pointed out, Heather Stuart stated that

> Definitive statements are difficult to make and it is equally possible to find recent literature supporting the conclusions that the mentally ill are no more violent, they are as violent, or they are more violent than their nonmentally ill counterparts.

From what I have seen, I would agree with you that this still stands today as a response to your question. The thing is, I have not seen an article which gives a definitive answer.

It is interesting to read the 2017 study on the FBC, RADAR and ALSPAC datasets you provided. The thing to note with this study is that although

> In the additional sensitivity analyses, we also adjusted for other factors including parental criminality, conduct disorder, and maltreatment where data were available.

what about information regarding maltreatment etc. which was not available? Those children who were subjected to undocumented external factors, which could affect their behaviours, would have been excluded from the adjustments and therefore, the statistics presented **may** be inaccurate.

Another point to make is that as the datasets seem to be based on self disclosures of violence, this, along with other issues raises all sorts of questions.

I would ask how the relevant studies defined violence when asking for the disclosures. How were the questions put forward? What was included in their definition of violence? Was verbal and/or mental abuse considered to be violence or was the scope restricted to just physical violence?

This could be one reason why there is a discrepancy between US studies and European studies. Another possibility is, were there cultural differences in play?

The differences in all the studies you pointed out using the Elbogen & Johnson data highlights the complexity of such a study. What mental illnesses were covered in the studies? Were any of the mental illnesses a result of (or made worse by) substance abuse, and if so, what is the prevalence of this factor?

There could also be all sorts of problems with interpretation of the data. @ArnonWeinberg shows an example of **possible** misinterpretation of data when referencing Sweden as *the rape capital of the world*. (See here for what I am — and possibly also what Arnon is — referring to).

There are so many questions which seem hard to answer with what I have seen and these sort of questions may not be able to be answered in a full meta analysis involving all studies on the mentally ill as this may end in a great deal of speculation. However, a full meta analysis of all studies in all age groups could point these flaws out and lead to a more thorough study which would iron out those wrinkles. I personally would look forward to seeing one.

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Tags: abnormal-psychology
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# Question
Title: How can we determine if a traumatic event in our youngest days can influence our present behaviour?
Suppose that a little kid found him/herself in a traumatic situation at an age of which he or she has no conscious memories (let's say between 1 and 3 years old). For example, the kid was put in a situation where the little one experienced a lot of fear (of course you can ask if a very young kid can experience fear, but I can assure you it can). Maybe its mother wasn's paying attention to him/her while it was playing on the beach and a "mad dog" (who maybe was treated badly by his/her boss while being a puppy) attacked the poor one, while at the same time a police car with its siren on maximum volume was driving along the boulevard near the beach. Our kid grows older and when old enough he/she notices that every time it hears the loud sound of a police car's siren a feeling of "unusual" (I mean, everybody gets a little frightened when hearing the siren's sound, though less in the city than someone who never heard the sound before high fear comes bubbling up (I found myself in a very stressful situation when I was a kid of which I can remember nothing; I know this because my mother told me). The question is somewhat similar to this one but certainly not a duplicate.

Now, is there a way to determine if the story I told can be true and, if so, can we find out what the traumatic event was (assuming that no one told you, as my mother did; this is, by the way, the reason I know almost certainly that the story can be true)?

# Answer
It is an interesting question, there is a lack of data to answer with certainty, but some comments can be made about the development of fear, phobias and vital events:

The consequences or effects in the present of such events would be the result of learning, conditioning, those processes would depend on:

* The degree of importance that the event had, that is, characteristics such as the intensity of the stimulus and interpretation (causal attributions, control, possibility of restitution, etc.), if it is an event that is estimated may affect the survival of the individual, it will be considered as a vital event of the utmost importance. If the event produces a state of alarm or significant anxiety or if the event or related events or effects last for a considerable time.
* Conditional situations or situations similar to the event, in psychology are commonly labeled as generability. In general, it is expected that there will be a conditioning to all of the characteristics of the situation. For psychologists it is usually more convenient to study **adverse events** and not just cases of phobias or fear. For example dog phobias can focus on a specimen of certain characteristics, however, a certain degree of emotional reaction or anxiety or fear to all dogs is expected. The event (main) and its characteristics must be studied, the scope of the generability and the **intensity** of the stimulus to the different specimens or similar members or similar situations.
* A person can develop a specific phobia without having any **direct** experience. The person could learn the phobia by **vicarian** learning (for example, a person could develop a phobia based on observing effects on other people). In addition to dealing with fear or adverse emotional reactions it is maintained that people can learn by learning these reactions by **social** learning.

How can we determine if a traumatic event in our younger days can influence our current behavior? If you do not remember the event, the effects on your current behavior would come from the process of vicarious and social learning, that is, in your current behavior you would be conditioned by the information you have received about those events with the attribution (extra) that they are about yourself. In the supposed case of your mother (or other relatives who experienced the event and remembered) the expected effect would be much greater.
> 1 votes

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Tags: memory, personality
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# Question
Title: Open source software for running Internet psychological experiments that collect reaction time data
I've often used Inquisit to run psychological experiments online. The software enables delivery of stimuli (e.g., text, images, etc.) and collection of reaction times.

Obviously general purpose programming languages provide one avenue for delivery of online experiments. There's also a good listing of software for psychological experiments here. I've also seen PsyToolkit which is GNU licensed software for programming psychological experiments, but I'm not aware of any online option.

**Are there any open source options for online delivery of psychological experiments, particularly ones that enable reaction time measurement?**

# Answer
For an open source JavaScript/HTML/CSS solution, check out jsPsych. It can be used for reaction time measurement and interactive designs. An article describing the library was recently published in Behavior Research Methods.

A subsequent article investigated the properties of reaction time distributions collected with JavaScript compared to those collected with MATLAB and Psychtoolbox. The main result is that JavaScript was 10-40ms slower, but had equivalent variance across different experimental conditions and equal sensitivity to the experimental manipulation of set size in a visual search task.

There are several good answers to this related question about the validity and accuracy of response time measurements online. Many of those answers discuss findings that are relevant to JavaScript libraries like jsPsych.

de Leeuw, J. R. (2015). jsPsych: A JavaScript library for creating behavioral experiments in a Web browser. *Behavior Research Methods*, *47*(1), 1-12.

de Leeuw, J. R., & Motz, B. A. (2015). Psychophysics in a Web browser? Comparing response times collected with JavaScript and Psychophysics Toolbox in a visual search task. *Behavior Research Methods*, advance online publication.
> 13 votes

# Answer
Another option is ScriptingRT. It's open source and fairly easy to use. The experiments are designed via a script language and then compiled into Flash apps.

ScriptingRT is designed to measure reaction time differences in the millisecond range. Schubert et al. (2013) report comparisons with other response time programs (e.g., DMDX, e-prime, Inquisit, see Studies 1 and 2).

The data suggest that measuring reaction times with ScriptingRT is associated with a little bit more noise than on lab computers. However it is sufficiently precise for the type of questions typically addressed in psychological experiments.

From Study 1:

> the SDs of these responses stayed below 7 ms in all three browsers. That value is comparable to many regular keyboards and standard reaction time software. In addition, the constant added by measuring in ScriptingRT was about 60 ms. This result suggests that researchers using ScriptingRT should thus focus primarily on differences between RTs and be cautious when interpreting absolute latencies.

From Study 2:

> ScriptingRT resulted in both longer response latencies and a larger standard deviation than all other packages except SuperLab and E-Prime in one configuration. Nevertheless, in absolute terms, the SD of 4.21 is comparable to what was standard for keyboards for a long time \[16\]. It is thus clear that any test with ScriptingRT should be well powered and used to assess primarily paradigms with a large effect size.

Schubert, T.W., Murteira, C., Collins, E.C., Lopes, D. (2013). ScriptingRT: A software library for collecting response latencies in online studies of cognition. PLoS ONE 8: e67769. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0067769
> 7 votes

# Answer
We just released a beta version of Tatool Web based on JavaScript and HTML 5 which allows for running web experiments in the browser and measuring reaction times. You can check it out on www.tatool-web.com and of course it's open source.

http://www.tatool-web.com
> 5 votes

# Answer
I'm not sure if it can measure reaction times but Tatool, developed at the University of Zurich, is an open source experiment platform that can be run from the web:

http://www.tatool.ch/
> 4 votes

# Answer
Limesurvey is worth checking out (more suitable for questionnaire style tasks, but very flexible and with some coding it should be possible to, eg. record RTs)

Wextor could be another possibility - it allows building more complicated designs, has not been developed for a bit, though...
> 4 votes

# Answer
This is in development within PsychoPy. Porting has begun on the Python lib underlying PsychoPy into a JavaScript lib (PsychoJS) and the Builder graphical interface can now generate the necessary html/js code for that.

The technology on the backend is using WebGL where available (nearly everywhere, including our phone) and this should give good timing in that it synchronises to the screen refresh.

It's early days and there aren't data on RT precision yet but expectations are high. And all this is open-source, of course.

http://www.psychopy.org/online/online.html
> 4 votes

# Answer
WebExp is a free framework for developing web-based experiments, and the source code is freely available. The client side is a Java applet, so subjects must have Java installed on their computers. Perhaps this causes fewer drop-outs than having to install the executable generated by Inquisit Web. This paper discusses the timing accuracy of WebExp-based experiments.
> 3 votes

# Answer
To complement the answers, there's also Just Another Tool for Online Studies: JATOS (disclaimer: I'm one of the authors). It's an open source tool that focusses on the server side. It will provide:

* a secure server
* a database (MySQL or H2)
* participant management (optionally prevents repeated access)
* a graphical user interface to access results
* run group studies in real-time
* a few etceteras.

Because JATOS focusses on the server side, it doesn't restrict in -almost- any way what you run in the browser (i.e., what you do in the client side). That means that it's actually complementary to a few of the tools that other answers suggested, that will mostly give you client-side solutions to present stimuli and measure reaction times in the browser. For the latter, I use the `performance.now` method in JavaScript that runs in most browsers and works pretty well. Probably not for careful priming or multisensory integration-type experiments, though.
> 3 votes

# Answer
I would highly recommend looking at http://www.qualtrics.com/. You can take a look at free trial accounts and see how its easy to use interface is still extremely sophisticated – e.g. automatic option to record response time – and can be augmented with javascript when you want to.

I'm not sure of pricing because many universities often buy a site license. But Qualtrics has revolutionized the way we do experiments.
> 1 votes

# Answer
You should have a look at otree, "a Django-based framework for implementing multiplayer decision strategy games".

It is manly designed for experimental economics, but it is a very neat and versatile piece of software, and I am sure you could actually run most psychological experiment with it.

Once the experiment is coded, it only requires internet access and a browser on the part of the participant.

**Big plus** : otree comprises functionalities to connect with Amazon Mechanical Turk.

**Caveat** : I don't know if collecting reaction time data is a baseline option, but it should not be too hard to code into the framework.
> 1 votes

# Answer
Gorilla is cloud based software specifically designed for running reaction time behavioural science experiments online. It's not free, but it is affordable (£0.75 per respondent) and interfaces with popular recruitment services like mTurk and Prolific Academic.

There is a GUI questionnaire builder, task builder and experiment tree builder. So you don't need to do any coding. The vast majority of cognitive science tasks can be created in it very easily.

You can also add snippets of JavaScript to add custom functionality or use the built in code editor tool to create a completely bespoke task.

Disclosure: I built the Gorilla platform.
> 1 votes

# Answer
I am one of the core developers of **https://www.labvanced.com**, a very new and probably the most advanced online platform for creating, sharing, and conducting professional behavioral experiments.
There is a complete visual interface, so no need to program a single line of code, but still you can still write if statements, while loops, and asynchronous loadings etc. In fact any arbitrary logic, presenting video, audio, text and many more elements is possible, at the same time ensuring spatially and temporally very precise presentation in fullscreen mode.
From a data-recording perspective we allow, recording of any mouse and keyboard events, voice recording via microphone and eye and face tracking via webcam. We also offer automated text translations to over 50 languages, and have integrated crowdsourcing capabilities (mTurk etc.) to millions of participants worldwide.
Finally all experiments can run online in the browser or locally on your computer / in your lab, and you can simple start by using one of our over 50 experimental templates on **https://www.labvanced.com/expLibrary.html**
Most importantly there is a **free version** of our software and we are currently working to **open source the source code on github**. Just check it out at **https://www.labvanced.com**.

If you have any more quesiton, feel free to write me message.
> 1 votes

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Tags: methodology, software, internet
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# Question
Title: How effective is court imposed therapy compared to self-initiated therapy?
People are frequently court ordered to some form of therapy, whether it be in the form of a course, group therapy or individual therapy.

Some examples being; road rage, anger management, drunk driving, parenting.

As one would consider, much of the success of the therapeutic process lies within the individuals motivation. However, it is also balanced by the fact that the consequence of being under a court order, may provide enough impetus to motivate an individual to change a behaviour. It leads me to ask:

**What is the effectiveness of court imposed therapy, as compared to self initialised therapy options?**

# Answer
I found a few papers published on the topic of therapy by court order and while incarcerated. Psychotherapy doesn't seem to work most of the time without the full and willing cooperation of the patient.

> Over the past decade, the use of court-ordered psychotherapeutic treatments as a pretrial diversion or dispositional alternative has increased dramatically. Currently, little published research has documented the effectiveness of these court-ordered treatments. The studies reviewed here cast doubt on the assumption that mandatory psychotherapeutic treatments are effective in reducing future incidents of violence between spouses. The incremental benefit of court-ordered treatment over the deterrent effects of traditional criminal justice system remedies is unclear. Differences in abuse recidivism between subjects court-ordered into treatment and subjects arrested and untreated have been small. In addition, subjects withdraw from treatment despite a court order to attend, indicating that legal system involvement does not motivate many unwilling subjects. Furthermore, subjects who discontinue treatment prematurely remain violence-free almost as often as subjects who complete treatment programs, thus drawing into question the, specific impact of clinical treatment for men who abuse their spouses. Future research is necessary to elucidate the precise benefits and appropriate focus of court-ordered treatment programs.

-*Court-ordered treatment of spouse abuse*

> Interestingly, those who were mandated demonstrated less motivation at treatment entry, yet were more likely to complete treatment compared to those who were not court-ordered to treatment. While controlling for covariates known to be related to treatment completion, the logistic regression analyses demonstrated that court-ordered offenders were over 10 times more likely to complete treatment compared to those who entered treatment voluntarily (OR=10.9, CI=2.0-59.1, p=.006). These findings demonstrate that stipulated treatment for offenders may be an effective way to increase treatment compliance.

-*Does mandating offenders to treatment improve completion rates?*

> Patients who require court-ordered medication over objection constitute a group that is high risk for nonadherence after discharge and being refractive to treatment.

-*Outcomes Associated With Court-Ordered Treatment Over Objection in an Acute Psychiatric Hospital*

> A significant decrease in the dynamic scale scores of the J-SOAP-II \[Juvenile Sex Offender Assessment Protocol II\] was found only for the moderate treatment group (9 to 23 months).

-*Treatment Impact of an Integrated Sex Offender Program as Measured by J-SOAP-II*
> 3 votes

# Answer
I found one 2009 review by Snyder and Anderson that attempted to answer your question, i.e. whether external coercion makes a difference in therapy outcomes. From its sheepish abstract, you can probably guess that no firm conclusion can be drawn. The review is narrative, not systematic, although they do split their discussion by field of intervention: domestic violence, child abuse, incest, and substance abuse.

Alas most of the papers cited in there fall in two categories: those that (like your question) cast doubt on the outcomes from a theoretical perspective, or are empirical papers that don't directly compare voluntary to mandated therapy outcomes, but rather present correlational evidence why mandated therapy is a good idea. For example, in the case of domestic abuse, the number of abusive incidents is inversely correlated with the length of stay (number of sessions) in therapy. And--so the logic goes--it's better to have the batterer stay in therapy for longer no matter how that's achieved. But there's not a single paper cited in that section that directly evaluated the contrast you want (mandatory vs self-initiated). The same can be said for child abuse and incest, areas in which there's hardly any self-initiated therapy.

Only in the area of substance abuse there are some direct contrast papers, but most are of rather low quality and varying methodology and thus have fairly contradictory results:

> While some outcome research reports that mandated clients did better than voluntary clients (Chopra, Preston, & Gerson, 1979; Dunham & Mauss, 1982), others (Smart, 1974) report that voluntary clients fared better. The majority, however, have found similarly beneficial outcomes for both groups (Anglin, Brecht, & Maddahian, 1989; Brecht, Anglin, & Wang, 1993; De Leon, 1988; Flores, 1983; Freedberg & Johnston, 1978; Hubbard et al., 1989; McGlothlin, 1979; Watson, Brown, Tilleskjor, Jacobs, & Pucel, 1988). Illustrative of these findings was a study by Anglin et al. (1989), who found that outcomes (length of stay in treatment, posttreatment gains) did not differ for addicts with legally coerced versus voluntary treatment entry. They suggested that given these findings, it made little sense to promote a social policy that allowed drug-dependent individuals to choose when to enter treatment and when to leave. Instead, a less costly and more efficient process would be to implement a more externally constraining system that does not rely on the individual’s fluctuating motivational state. In a literature review covering up to the year 2000, Miller and Flaherty (2000) concluded that the preponderance of the literature confirms the efficacy of mandated addiction treatment and that coercion helped motivate clients to comply with treatment.
>
> The inconsistent findings that have emerged in this literature may be due to the fact that outcome research in the area of substance abuse treatment has suffered from various methodological shortcomings (Howard & McCaughrin, 1996; Rotgers, 1992; Shearer, 2000). These include differences in outcome measures (e.g., measuring recidivism rates rather than client drinking levels, measuring employee job performance rather than level of substance use) and differences in comparison groups (e.g., comparing young, mandated, relatively healthy individuals with voluntary, older, chronic addicts). Differences may also be due to definitional inconsistencies as to what constitutes a mandated client (De Leon, 1988; Rotgers, 1992), addicts’ personal characteristics that affect response to treatment (such as the existence of personality disorders), or variations in treatment plans (Anglin et al., 1989). Others point to the inevitable problem of lack of control groups and random assignments (Howard & McCaughrin, 1996) and selection or recruitment bias (Dunham & Mauss, 1982). As it is virtually impossible to secure random assignment to treatment conditions, any quasi-experimental design which is implemented will be unable to definitively determine which effects on the outcome variable are due to treatment effects, rather than preexisting differences in the groups such as severity of the drinking problem, age, education, or social class. Finally, others point out that treatment programs vary widely and thus program sources of variance obscure the measurement of treatment effectiveness for legally referred clients (Inciardi, 1994).
>
> In what has been described as one of the only research studies that has tried to address many of these methodological problems, and ‘‘probably the best designed and executed study of coercion and treatment outcome to date’’ (Rotgers, 1992), Walsh et al. (1991) compared results of three treatment options for employees referred by their employee assistance plan for alcohol problems (compulsory inpatient; mandatory Alcoholics Anonymous \[AA\] meetings only; or voluntary option to do either). The employees were randomly assigned to these treatment programs and followed for 2 years. All three groups were found to have improved in terms of job functioning and reduced drinking, with the inpatient clients faring the best. As the employer could back up the referral to treatment with firing if drinking continued, the researchers opined that clients’ motivation for succeeding in the more intensive inpatient condition might have been confounded with employer coercion.
>
> Research shows that length of time in treatment affects outcome, and mandated clients do appear to remain in treatment longer than voluntary clients (De Leon, Melnick, & Tims, 2001; Goldsmith & Latessa, 2001; Leukefeld & Tims, 1988; Satel, 2000). In an interesting study, Dunham and Mauss (1982) compared the differential rates of alcoholism treatment success rates for courtmandated and voluntary clients in a community alcoholism treatment center, statistically controlling for pretreatment differences. Clients were divided into four groups: self-referrals, informal agency (AA, physician) referrals, driving while impaired (DWI; court) referrals, and other legal⁄ court referrals. While it was found that certain socioeconomic traits had a powerful impact on outcome (i.e., no prior treatment experience, active employment, education, not dependent on social assistance, stable marriage and family life), type of referral was a stronger predictor of outcome. The more coercion that was applied, the better the outcome. Treatment success was greater for those referred from the justice system than those attending voluntarily. The success rate for DWI clients was almost double that of voluntary clients (43% vs. 22%). The authors concluded that the certainty of the consequences for noncompliance with treatment for the DWI clients, and their having the most to lose (as they had the best occupations, highest education, etc.), was an important factor. Dehmel, Klett, and Buhringer (1986) also found that more socially integrated clients (e.g., employed, stable home, and family life) had a greater likelihood of completing treatment.

And ultimate reason posited for this is that time in therapy seem to beat other considerations, allowing even a voluntary kind of self-motivation to emerge:

> the research literature suggests that what mandated clients may lack in terms of initial motivation may be more than compensated for by their tendency to stay in treatment longer than their voluntary counterparts, allowing time for intrinsic motivation to develop and therapeutic techniques to take effect. Length of time in treatment affects outcome, and mandated clients appear to remain in treatment longer than their voluntary counterparts.
>
> \[...\]
>
> We have found no research to date that has examined whether the strength of the \[therapeutic\] alliance or the mandated versus voluntary referral status is more predictive of outcome. This would seem to be a topic worthy of investigation.

But perhaps for substance abuse (the only area where apparently there's enough research for the contrast you want) it does seem to look like "time in therapy trumps everything else" (with the caveat that it may be mediated by actually building a therapeutic alliance...) at least based on this review, which being a narrative one has non-trivial potential for bias.
> 1 votes

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Tags: abnormal-psychology, motivation, clinical-psychology, forensic-psychology
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title: Narcissistic personality recent studies

text:
# Question
Title: Narcissistic personality recent studies
I have recently read the Nancy McWilliams' book "Psychoanalytic Diagnosis" and learned that serious studies on narcissistic personality were done mostly in the end of the XXth century. However her book does not contain any reference dating in recent 28 years. I doubt the research in this direction has just abruptly stopped.

Could you please point me to some particular references or more generally authors who are thought to have made some significant contributions to this field in relatively recent years?

# Answer
> 1 votes
I think, I have found an answer, more or less. There is a person called Sam Vaknin, who published a book called "Malignant self-love". Even though Vaknin is not an academic himself, the book does contain references to more recent studies.

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Tags: reference-request, personality, personality-disorder
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title: What does "unconscious memory" mean?

text:
# Question
Title: What does "unconscious memory" mean?
Is there a single notion in the cognitive sciences for "unconscious memory"? For example a in a 2015 Northwestern University press release, we find that

> * Scientists retrieve unconscious memories
> * Could lead to new treatment for patients with repressed traumatic memories

So this is basically talking about repressed memories (in humans, as the motivation) and also state-dependent memory, as what they actually studied in mice.

On the other hand, in a different area of research we hear that

> The brain’s unconscious memories of patterns are likely to be partly responsible for some children struggling to learn to talk.

Is this the same notion as any of the previous two? Looking briefly at the paper it seems like it's talking about procedural memory instead (correct me if I'm wrong).

So how many (sufficiently) different notions of "unconscious memory" are there in the (contemporary) science literature?

# Answer
> 2 votes
Although we usually refer to *memory* to describe our ability to consciously remember past experiences, in neuroscience this term is also used to incorporate unconscious influences of our past on our *current perceptions and actions*. In other words, sometimes/in some instances, we are not aware of the influences of our past on our way to remember things.

> These unconscious influences on our current behaviour depend on what has been called **implicit memory** or **nondeclarative memory** that can exist in individuals with damage to the *hippocampal memory system* (centre of declarative or explicit / conscious memory).

This example is often made: if you try to describe how you learned to drive a stick-shift car,it is likely that you wouldn't do a good job of consciously reconstructing the chain of sequences that allowed you to learn how to drive a stick-shift car... Nevertheless, your behaviour would be a clear indication of you training.

*Memory is not a single entity but consists of multiple processes or systems*

References: Emotional memory across the lifespan Elizabeth A. Kensinger

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Tags: memory, terminology, unconscious
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# Question
Title: Episodic-memory amnesia preserving fear conditioning
Are there any experiments in humans where despite episodic-memory amnesia they still preserve (associative) fear conditioning developed during the episode/event that is lost from episodic memory?

I'm hoping maybe it was tested in someone like Henry Molaison whether someone could develop fear conditioning but not remember how they've got it, i.e. a form of source amnesia but for \[fear\] conditioning rather than the usual notion of source amnesia for some \[declarative memory\] knowledge.

Wikipedia does mention that:

> Experiments involving repetition priming underscored Molaison's ability to acquire implicit (non-conscious) memories, in contrast to his inability to acquire new explicit semantic and episodic memories (Corkin, 2002).

However, looking myself at that paper, it seems all experiments (mentioned there) were done with semantic priming rather any form of affective priming.

# Answer
As a sort of partial answer, but since it's too much to add to the question itself... a more encompassing question would be whether fear conditioning can occur without awareness of the conditioning event happening at all. I suppose an affirmative answer to the latter implies the answer is also "yes" to my question because forgetting the association event doesn't seem any more restrictive than not learning (into episodic memory) about it in the first place.

However, the jury seems to still be out on whether unaware conditioning can happen in humans. Some initial (and highly cited) studies answered the question affirmatively, but later studies cast doubt on the results because the level of awareness for the stimuli used seem to vary with the individual. (In other words, there was heterogeneity in awereness in the original studies; for a completely different reason, I've looked into what happens in such a case and asked what the phenomenon is called on cross-validated, but with not very satisfying answers insofar) From a 2005 review by Pessoa, which summarized the research up to then:

> Does the processing of emotional stimuli depend upon awareness? Two influential neuroimaging papers, both of which appeared in 1998, reported that responses in the human amygdala occur in the absence of visual awareness. Awareness was manipulated by employing backward masking, as introduced by Esteves and Ohman in a behavioural paradigm. In one study, fearful faces were shown for 33 ms and were immediately replaced by a neutral ‘mask’ face that was presented for 167 ms. Subjects were naive as to the stimulus conditions, which included masked fearful and masked happy faces. Stronger responses were observed in response to fearful rather than happy faces (both masked by neutral faces), even though, upon subsequent debriefing, subjects did not report seeing any emotional faces. In another study, Morris et al. combined backward masking with classical conditioning to investigate responses to perceived and non-perceived angry faces. Although the participants did not report seeing the masked angry stimuli (angry faces were shown for 30 ms and followed by a neutral mask that was shown for 45 ms), the contrast of conditioned and non-conditioned masked angry faces activated the right amygdala. Recent studies have also gathered evidence for unaware processing by the amygdala For instance, Glascher and Adolphs showed that in normal controls, but not in patients with amygdala lesions, arousal ratings correlated with skin conductance responses for both subliminal (unaware) and supraliminal (aware) conditions (see Glossary). Together with the important earlier work by Ohman and colleagues, these results have strengthened the view that emotional processing occurs independently of conscious awareness. In general, a stimulus that is shown for about 30 ms before masking is considered to be at the ‘threshold’ for awareness.
>
> However, a recent study by Phillips et al. did not observe any response in the amygdala during unaware conditions. The authors compared aware conditions, in which target faces (fearful or disgusted) were shown for 170 ms and followed by a mask that was shown for 100 ms, with unaware conditions, in which target faces were shown for 30 ms and, again, followed by a mask that was shown for 100 ms. Unlike prior studies, however, no differential responses were observed in the amygdala in association with fearful faces in the unaware condition (or in the anterior insula for unaware disgusted faces).
>
> A crucial issue in the assessment of awareness is the criteria used to determine whether a participant is aware or unaware of a stimulus. According to ‘objective’ criteria, unaware perception occurs when a subject’s performance in a ‘forced-choice’ task is at chance. Under such conditions, behavioral effects of unaware stimuli (e.g. faster reaction time to undetected fearful faces), as well as the associated fMRI signals, constitute correlates of unaware perception. According to ‘subjective’ criteria, unaware perception occurs when subjects report that they are unable to perform the task better than by chance (independent of their actual objective performance). Although some of the previous studies used forced-choice objective methods, they did not assess performance in a manner that is independent of response bias on an individual-by-individual basis \[...\]. This is important because in the face of weak, noisy signals, subjects might indicate that they do not detect target stimuli and thus appear to be unable to detect them reliably. A recent behavioral study by Pessoa et al. addressed these issues by analyzing performance by way of signal detection methods. The authors varied the duration (17, 33 and 83 ms) of which a target face (fearful, happy or neutral) was shown before being immediately replaced by a neutral-face mask (which was shown for 116, 100, and 50 ms, respectively, such that the target plus mask lasted 133 ms in each case). The subject’s task was to report explicitly whether or not a fearful face was presented in each trial, and also to rate their confidence in this decision. Although some subjects only reliably detected the fearful targets that were shown for 83 ms, 36% of the participants were able to detect both the 33 ms and 83 ms targets. Remarkably, some subjects could even detect fearful faces that were shown for 17 ms before masking. These results demonstrated that participants differ widely in their sensitivity to fearful faces (Figure 1). Moreover, the results revealed that even very brief (17 ms) stimuli can be incompletely masked, consistent with another recent study \[Maxwell and Davidson\]. The findings by Pessoa et al. also raise the possibility that the discrepancy between the results of Phillips et al. nd those of prior studies might be caused, at least in part, by variability in sensitivity among individuals, which may be related to anxiety levels.

I'm not sure if there's a more recent review than this perhaps with different conclusions following newer experiments. The fact that the review was written by someone who also contributed primary research in the "cast doubt" direction casts a little doubt (in my mind) on its objectivity... But the above surely illustrates the difficulty in conducting studies related to awareness.
> 2 votes

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Tags: conditioning, fear, episodic-memory, amnesia
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# Question
Title: Is detection of angry faces more efficient in humans?
Hansen and hansen proposed the **anger superiority effect:** threatening faces pop out of crowds, perhaps as a result of a preattentive, parallel search for signals of direct threat.

Pinkham (2010) demonstrated that we are faster when we have to spot an angry face than the happy one (below).

*Can we really establish that we have an anger superiority effect?*

Angry faces and non-angry faces differ for too many features...

**How can we attribute this result (angry faces faster detected) to anger-related features, when so many other features (not necessarily related to anger) are different?**

*references*

Hansen & Hansen, 1988

# Answer
> 2 votes
I'm not sure there's totally indisputable evidence on this, but I found a newer (2017) paper by Bayet et al. with infant subjects, but with fear rather than anger as the emotion tested (vs. happy), and (more importantly) using a different methodology (and IMHO better) because instead of different faces (in a crowd), they used the same face but mixed with noise, e.g. for fear \[but for illustrative purposes only, see blow why\]

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

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

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

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

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

Their interpretation of results:

> Psychometric curves of the PTLT to the face side revealed a significantly lower threshold for the Fearful eye+ face condition (44.41 ± 1.98% face signal; \[...\]; figure 3a) than for the Happy eye- face condition (difference: 5.20 +/- 2.62% face signal, 95% CI \[0.001 0.103\]), but not the other conditions (\[...\] figure 3a), across all age groups. \[...\] A similar result was found when applying psychometric curve modelling to the correct multivariate face versus noise discrimination evidence; the face detection threshold for the Fearful eye+ condition (44.07 ± 2.14% face signal; \[...\] figure 3c) was significantly lower than the detection threshold for the Happy eye- condition (increase in threshold: 7.90 ± 2.52% face signal, 95% CI \[0.030 0.128\]) but not the other conditions (Wald confidence intervals, alpha = 5%; \[...\]; figure 3c)
>
> Similar models were used to estimate the difference in threshold between the Fearful eye- condition and other conditions, or between the Happy eye+ condition and other conditions (electronic supplementary material, tables S5–S8). Results are summarized in figure 4. **Overall, psychometric curve modelling of infant looking data revealed face detection thresholds at about 44% signal, with an increase of about 5% signal in threshold for Happy eye- condition compared to the Fearful eye+ condition, and intermediate thresholds for Happy eye+ and Fearful eye- conditions depending on whether PTLT alone (figure 4a) or correct multivariate discrimination evidence (figure 4b) was used as a measure of face versus noise detection.**
>
> To clarify whether these differences in detection thresholds reflected a main effect of facial expression, a main effect of eye visibility, or an interaction between the two, and to test for an effect of age, we conducted further analyses focused on the linear portion of the psychometric curves corresponding to trials around the fitted detection thresholds (40–50% signal). \[...; figure 3b,c,e,f I'm omitting all the chi-square stats\]
>
> Results were mixed when considering PTLTs for the face side alone, as the effect of face emotion was restricted to 3.5-month-olds on this measure. However, correct discrimination evidence, a more comprehensive multivariate measure inclusive of PTLTs and other aspects of looking behaviour (e.g. first look) revealed a detection advantage for fearful faces compared to happy faces across all age groups (i.e. it did not significantly interact with age).

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

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

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Tags: social-psychology, cognitive-neuroscience, emotion
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