# Question
Title: Binary classification as a cognitive strategy?
Is there any research investigating whether the human cognitive system has a tendency to reduce complex systems or spectra of data in terms of binary contrast?

There are many common-sense dual taxonomical sets. Some of these have a basis in objective reality (the binary male/female has proved an especially effective evolutionary strategy), others may be argued to be more in the eye of the beholder. Day and night could be said to be extremes in a cycle; left and right, conservative and liberal are ranges on a spectrum (cf. friend and foe; "there are only two kinds of people"). A lot has been written about gender identity and sexual orientation in the framework of a Hegelian master/slave dialectic, but I am not interested in the *relationship* between the members in an oppositional set. Structuralist theorists and anthropologists have claimed and then disclaimed that societies organize themselves in binary sets, but more interesting to me than factual organization is how reality is perceived. Also, when an anthropologist or theorist says most concepts are defined by contrast with their opposites, I can't help but wonder whether we have quantifiable data along these lines.

I am hoping to find out whether these common-sense binary taxonomies correlate with cognitive/perceptive processes. Especially interesting to me is the question whether there are certain low-level cognitive strategies, though I am also interested in high-level processes (e.g. formal logic is mostly organized along binary lines, true/false). Since the cognitive sciences are not my field, I would be very grateful for references to both foundational studies and "raw" field work. General works on the reduction of reality to accommodate limited processing power are also welcome. Visual processes are not my primary interest, but if you can point to a single "best primer" on the filter that allows us to "see" an entire bookcase but not all book titles in a single glance, that would be a helpful bonus. I know nothing about the workings of biological neural networks, but if there is a binary selection at any point in their operation, I would be very grateful to see that explained in an accessible but peer-reviewed text. Finally, keywords to help me find more on this in scholarship search engines would be most helpful.

# Answer
> 1 votes
Binary processes may be observed at various stages of intuitive and deliberative thought, which may in some cases plausibly be modelled as categories, but you’ll want to consider that on a case-by-case basis. Many of the relevant processes are binary simply because like formal logic, they involve toggle switches (true/false).

### Heuristics

The simplifying processes alluded to in the question have been studied above all in the form of heuristics, i.e. mental strategies for judgement and decision-making that bypass a good deal of relevant computation in favour of simple cues that seem to (but may not) correlate well with success (Payne, Bettman, and Johnson 1993; Gigerenzer and Todd 1999; Czerlinski, Gigerenzer, and Goldstein 1999). A variety of models exist, most of which concern preferential decision-making, but categorization models also exist, and at any rate the two are closely intertwined. Most models involve binary processes in the selection process, particularly because judgement and decision-making involve matching objects against a criterion. Examples are the decision-making model Elimination by Aspects (Tversky 1972) and the categorization model Categorization by Elimination (Beretty, Todd, and Blythe 1997), which cycle through features in order of descending salience and/or effectiveness at narrowing down choice. Objects (options) that fail to meet the criterion under review are ruled out; it could thus be said that there is a binary matching principle at work even in cases where the cue (e.g. wine aroma) is not binary. Another popularly studied example is the recognition heuristic, which associates the known objects in a set with a higher criterion value than unknown objects in the same set: this strategy is modelled on a binary cue (match or no match, as opposed to a graded scale). The particular effectiveness of simple heuristics in situations with binary cues is discussed in Hogarth and Karelaia 2006.

It should be noted, however, that some of the most commonly mentioned studies of preferential decicion-making involve binary choice: which of the two? This binary feature is a research bias: binary choice is the minimal working example of preferential decision-making. Still, the recognition heuristic is of relevance to the question precisely because it does not provide a complete strategy for dealing with a variety of objects with different degrees of familiarity. It says simply that a first strategy can be to distinguish between completely unknown and not completely unknown, at which point the use of this heuristic is exhausted and the mind turns to other strategies. The real significance of this heuristic to the question therefore depends on its validity and documented application with non-binary sets and relative familiarity; the outcome of such tests would tell you a good deal about the real-world attestation of dichotomous thinking along these lines.

In the tradition of Payne and Gigerenzer, adaptiveness is a critical part of the heuristic process: environmental factors determine what reductive strategies we use. When simplifying reality through heuristic means, what features survive in our cognitive model of the world at the moment of judgement or decision-making will thus depend on why we are accessing these concepts in the first place. A binary set like day and night is more likely to occur to us when deciding whether to bring our bicycle lights when leaving the house, and less likely when scheduling a dentist appointment (though this too involves a binary set, available/unavailable).

### Linguistics

The elimination models developed for decision-making have also been used to model memory access to semantic content. Rachel Giora has written a slew of articles advancing the idea that word senses that are salient in the mental lexicon are accessed first; other senses are activated if the first does not match the context (e.g. Giora 1999). The same matching paradigm could be extended across many aspects of syntax, for instance.

### Keywords

That should be a start, but it’s a topic of some scope. Keywords could combine members of the following sets:

* contrast, contrastive, binary, dual, dualistic, dichotomous, dichotomy
* heuristic, cognitive, salience, simplify, simplification, judgment, judgement, decision

@Nick Stauner's comment and @what's answer contain references to significant additional avenues to investigate.

## Bibliography

Berretty, Patricia M., Peter M. Todd, and Philip W. Blythe. 1997 “Categorization by Elimination: A Fast and Frugal Approach to Categorization.” *Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society*. Eds M.G. Shafto and P. Langley. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Czerlinski, Jean, Gerd Gigerenzer, and Daniel G. Goldstein. 1999. “How Good are Simple Heuristics?” *Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart*. Eds. Gerd Gigerenzer and Peter M. Todd. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 97–118.

Gigerenzer, Gerd, and Peter M. Todd, eds. 1999. *Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart*. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Giora, Rachel. 1999. “On the Priority of Salient Meanings: Studies of Literal and Figurative Language.” *Journal of Pragmatics* 31: 99–129.

Hogarth, Robin M., and Natalia Karelaia. 2006. “ ‘Take-the-Best’ and Other Simple Strategies: Why and When They Work ‘Well’ With Binary Cues.” *Theory and Decision* 61: 205–49.

Payne, John W., James R. Bettman, and Eric J. Johnson. 1993. *The Adaptive Decision Maker*. Cambridge: Cambridge University press.

Tversky, Amos. 1972. “Elimination by Aspects: A Theory of Choice.” *Psychological Review* 79.4 (July): 281–99.

# Answer
> 6 votes
I think there is a misperception at work in your question. There is a wide variety of objects that we never perceive in such a binary manner: colors, fruit (apples, oranges, plums, ...), weather, and basically every other concrete objects. **The only things we perceive in a binary fashion are abstract ideas!** Good versus evil. Liberal versus conservative. And here we can ask about the reality (which is more complex) and the function of this simplification. The answer is: *speed of decision making*.

The basic binary classification is **negation**: x versus not x. The usefulness of this distinction becomes apparent when you put it in context: Is this berry edible or not? Do I want to trust this person or not? All binary opposites have a negation at their basis and divide the world into things you want to avoid and things you want to interact with.

And since human beings have to decide about one million things every day, they make life easier by using heuristics to make most of these decisions: simple rules based on experience, so you don't have to think before you vote for your next president.

The few binaries that are more or less objective, are categories of measurement: long/short, hot/cold, bright/dark, etc. That the physical reality underlying these measurements is maybe more complex (e.g. coldness depends not only on temperature, but also on the humidity of the air and the speed of the wind), is not relevant to the one-dimensionality of our sensation.

Night and day is not binary, since we have dawn and dusk and late afternoon and early morning and the dead of night as well to differentiate subjective time, relative visibility, quality of light, restedness/tiredness etc., that all make up the meaning of "night", "day" and other daytime names. The phrase "day and night" is binary only in certain phrases where they have symbolic meaning (e.g. "day" = *good*, "night" = *evil*, or "working night and day" = *working all the time, without resting*).

---

Studying the development of thinking styles in college students, Perry (1970) found that as they grow their thinking advances from a dualistic black-and-white perspective to a multiplicity of truths that allows for uncertainty. They also grow from a purely intellectual to an ethical perspective. In the course of this development, dualistic thinking can serve as an alternative to forward progression, and persons that already have developed to a higher level of thinking can use dualistic thinking as a "retreat" (Zang, 2002): "a student returns to a dualistic orientation to find security and the strength to cope with an overchallenging environment".

Binary thinking is related to personality disorders such as borderline personality and narcissism (Oshio, 2012): "The results indicated that thinking dichotomously may lead to wide-ranging personality disorders."

---

Sources:

* Oshio, A. (2012). An all‐or‐nothing thinking turns into darkness: Relations between dichotomous thinking and personality disorders. *Japanese Psychological Research, 54*(4), 424-429. doi:10.1111/j.1468-5884.2012.00515.x
* Perry, W. G. (1970). *Forms of intellectual and ethical development in the college years: A scheme*. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
* Zhang, L. F. (2002). Thinking styles and cognitive development. *The Journal of Genetic Psychology, 163*(2), 179-195.

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Tags: perception, cognitive-neuroscience, bias, visualization, categorisation
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title: Is depression an inflammatory disease?

text:
# Question
Title: Is depression an inflammatory disease?
In the paper:

it is presented as an undisputed fact that depression is an inflammatory disease.

For example (the first sentence of the abstract):

> We now know that depression is associated with a chronic, low-grade inflammatory response and activation of cell-mediated immunity, as well as activation of the compensatory anti-inflammatory reflex system.

However, AFAIK, we are far from understanding the etiology of depression (perhaps there is no universal one). Sure, there are many correlates (for example – levels of neurotransmitters), but I haven't heard that there a single, accepted cause (except for the cited paper). For the reference, Wikipedia mentions inflammation as one of multiple related conditions in the "Other hypotheses" section.

So, as of now, **is it universally accepted that depression is an inflammatory disease?** And if not, is it at least one of many mainstream opinions?

Discussion on HN, through which I've learnt about this paper

# Answer
There certainly isn't a single cause of depression. Wikipedia does not list inflammation, so that seems to be sufficient disproof of universal acceptance, and at least one candidate for representative of mainstream opinions. Berk and colleagues (2013) make a pretty convincing case though, so it may only be a matter of time, exposure to the evidence, and someone bothering to update Wikipedia.

For another, partially independent (probably cites some of the same studies), preexisting reference on the matter, check out *Psychology Today*'s article, "The Brain on Fire: Inflammation and Depression: Inflammation and Its Effects on Mood" (Greenblatt, 2011, November 23). It too supports the potentially causal relationship, though I don't see any direct evidence of inflammation causing depression here. You may want to scrutinize it more closely than I have; if you find anything, please comment or edit!
> 5 votes

# Answer
While it is indeed one of the theories, it is by no means not the mainstream one. Nowadays, it seems the neurogenic theory of depression is gaining a lot of support, if one looks at recent publications.

Briefly, the theory claims that impaired neurogenesis prevents replenishment of parahippocampal granule cells that normally inhibit the amygdala – a structure harboring fear and anxiety circuits.

The neurogenic theory also explains some of the correlations between inflammation and depression, namely the involvement of a factor known as NFkB.

If you're interested in knowing more, I'd be happy to recommend readings.
> 2 votes

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Tags: depression
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# Question
Title: Can the daily use of two or more languages impact cognitive capacity?
I've read the following threads:

Language is clearly a very good tool for structuring ideas and communicating. I want to know if there is a correlation between cognitive capacity (in the same way CheeseConQueso expressed it) and using two or more languages fluently.

The following questions might help define what I'm wondering:

* Is it possible for someone who uses two or more languages daily to switch between "thought languages"?
    + If so, would it help broadening one's conceptual skills and adaptability?
* What language combinations would then be better mixed together?

# Answer
A lot of research seems to have been done on the challenges multilingualism poses for the human brain, but not so much on how much actually meeting those challenges improves one's overall cognitive capacity. At present the general approach seems to be summed up: "Cognitive science suggests that the brain has selective resources with limited capacity" (Emily Holmes et al.). Stanislas Dehaene in particular asks, "How can cerebral circuits that normally handle a single phonology, lexicon and syntax adapt to the storage of multiple language systems?", and suggests that "sophisticated mechanisms of segregation must exist to prevent cross-talk." These can be witnessed in action when "anyone trying the well-known party trick of reciting the number sequence while switching languages (for instance *un*, two, *trois*, four, *cinq*) will recognise that central coordination is a very plausible source of difficulty in translation and language switching." Source of difficulty maybe, but not yet apparently evidence of positive capacity for other tasks. Hopefully some work has gone down that road since.

References:

Holmes, E. et al. "Can Playing the computer game 'Tetris' reduce the Build-Up of Flashbacks for Trauma? A proposal from Cognitive Science" Abstract. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0004153

Dehaene, S. "Fitting two languages into one brain" Brain (1999) 122(12)

**Since this answer I have indeed found some reports on the beneficial cognitive effects of bi- if not multi-lingualism:**

*Researchers said the extra effort involved in using more than one language appeared to boost blood supply to the brain and ensure nerve connections remained healthy - two factors thought to help fight off dementia. "We are pretty dazzled by the results," Professor Ellen Bialystok of Toronto's York University said in a statement. "In the process of using two languages, you are engaging parts of your brain, parts of your mind that are active and need that kind of constant exercise and activity, and with that experience \[it\] stays more robust," she later told CTV television.* (Bilingualism delays onset of dementia 23:22 12 January 2007 by New Scientist and Reuters)

*So his team compared the age dementia symptoms appeared in some 650 natives of Hyderabad, India, over a six-year period. About half spoke at least two languages. This group's symptoms started on average four and a half years later than those in monolingual individuals. The same pattern appeared for Alzheimer's, frontotemporal and vascular dementia. The results also held true for a group of people who were illiterate, suggesting that the benefits of being bilingual don't depend on education (Neurology, DOI: 10.1212/01.wnl.0000436620.33155.a4). A leading theory as to why bilingualism may affect dementia involves the constant suppression of one language, and switching between the two. "This permanent switching and suppressing offers you constant brain training," says Bak.* ("Learn une autre langue to hold off dementia" New Scientist 9 November 2013.)
> 5 votes

# Answer
To answer the question of the title, yes, bilingualism is beneficial in theory.

However, in practice, it is not so. In America we do not have a true bilingual system of education, so it is difficult to judge the success of bilingualism based on our public foreign language education. With about 90% of American High Schools offering and sometimes requiring a foreign language, the benefits of bilingualism (if immersion and high proficiency was not required) are observed to be limited at best.

Moreover, fully bilingual societies still have the same fluid intelligence overall. The nigh-universal Flynn effect isn't improved as societies become multilingual.

Moreover, if you consider my reasoning biased by social stratification, let's examine a more equal set of multilingual groups. Consider (a) the computer science major in college where each student is tasked with learning and using in detail several computer languages of many differing types and forms and (b) the foreign language major. They score well on IQ tests, but so do many other majors not intrinsically requiring immersion into multilingualism.

Yes, switching the languages of thought is a non-task. I do not think (but I cannot prove) there are any advantages to the non-task.

In Computer Science (and computer scientists have multilingual brains.) a diverse set of languages from multiple paradigms are taught as a general rule of thumb. This is done so that one is familiar with all the basic concepts of linguistics (declarative, imperative and functional come to mind). In spoken languages anthropology would point you to the most diverse set of languages to build a multilingual set of knowledge.

Though this is anecdotal, my IQ as measured by a trained psychologist (both times) did increase a small amount (5 points) after my training in Computer Science was finished.
> 3 votes

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Tags: perception, intelligence, language
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# Question
Title: Are perceptions of beauty and the ideal partner mostly determined by mass media?
Mass-media marketing seems to strongly influence people's beliefs.

**Are perceptions of beauty and the ideal partner mostly determined by what mass media proposes?**

# Answer
Sexual attraction has mostly but not only a biological roots. Can this particular woman bear healthy children for me? Do I want this man? Can he be a good father? In a few seconds, someone can evaluate this simply in his/her mind (evaluate such factors as: height, weight, balance, hips, hair, smell, voice, how healthy the person looks, etc.)

Also, social factors have an influence on our expectations. Mass media is part of our life, we live in its circle, it forms our culture, makes trends, and influences the path we are making and choices in our life.

The power of influence depends on few factors: the place someone lives (open/close to mass media), the family (all we are from our childhood), and some basic physiological factors we were born with, etc.

Locus of control defines the orientation of a person (internal/external) while choosing the way of living. For some it's more important that their partners are good from the society view (from mass-media view); for others it's not so important.

From Wiki, not very close, but interesting:

> Consumer research
>
> Locus of control has also been applied to the field of consumer research. For example, Martin, Veer and Pervan (2007) examined how the weight locus of control of women (i.e., beliefs about the control of body weight) influence how they react to female models in advertising of different body shapes. They found that women who believe they can control their weight ("internals"), respond most favorably to slim models in advertising, and this favorable response is mediated by self-referencing. In contrast, women who feel powerless about their weight ("externals"), self-reference larger-sized models, but only prefer larger-sized models when the advertisement is for a non-fattening product. For fattening products, they exhibit a similar preference for larger-sized models and slim models. The weight locus of control measure was also found to be correlated with measures for weight control beliefs and willpower"

Also there is a good test: Locus of Control.

Your question can be answered simply; it has deep roots and looks interesting for me too. I'll try to find some more modern research to post here.
> 5 votes

# Answer
The 'hardwired' things we value in partners include not only physical and psychological suitability for procreating, but also social *status*. Thus, any visible indicators that we associate with high status are also perceived as sexy even if they don't have no direct match to anything else, and mass media can affect what properties indicators are perceived this way, by associating them with 'high social status' celebrities.

I believe the classic example used to illustrate this phenomenon is sun tan - a few centuries ago lack of sun tan used to illustrate high status (possibly because it demonstrated that you don't have to do physical work outdoors) and was perceived as attractive; and in 20th century sun tan used to illustrate high status (possibly because it demonstrated that you can spend your time vacationing in sunny climates) and was perceived as attractive. Nowadays tan is much less informative, but this shows how preferences can switch to opposite effects.
> 1 votes

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Tags: social-psychology, physical-attraction, aesthetics, consumer-psychology, neuromarketing
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# Question
Title: Overview of Pitts & McCullough (1943) "A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity"
Is there a good tutorial or simplified overview of the paper, 'Logical calculus for nervous activity' (McCullough & Pitts, 1943)?

**Reference**
McCullough, W. S., & Pitts, W. (1943). A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity. *The Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, 5*(4), 115–133. Retrieved from http://cns-classes.bu.edu/cn550/Readings/mcculloch-pitts-43.pdf.

# Answer
It seems there is! Check out Marsalli's module from The Mind Project's curriculum and let me know if it works for you. It seems McCullough and Pitts' paper was important enough to be cited very many times, so there are probably several other options out there for you.

**Reference**
Marsalli, M. McCulloch-Pitts neurons. *The Mind Project: Curriculum.* Retrieved from http://www.mind.ilstu.edu/curriculum/modOverview.php?modGUI=212.
> 3 votes

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Tags: computational-modeling, theoretical-neuroscience
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title: Is perfectionism related to OCD?

text:
# Question
Title: Is perfectionism related to OCD?
Is it right to say that a *really strong attitude and stubbornness to do something* is *really similar to an obsession*?

I'll try to explain better what I mean.

Let's take a really good developer or a really good scientist. Very often the reason which is leading him to be so good is the addiction to his work.

For some guys, for example, the respect for the rule should be *maniacal*.

So, is it possible to state that a strong perfectionism / addiction is often readable as a form of obsessive personality trait? (maybe ego-syntonic, and since not a disorder)

# Answer
Perhaps check out the Obsessive Beliefs Questionnaire which is designed to measures dysfunctional beliefs related to OCD. There are several papers that examine the factor structure, and perfectionism is typically seen as one of the major aspects of obsessive beliefs.

However, it seems to be a particular form of maladaptive perfectionism. See these perfectionism items from the OBQ:

> * In order to be a worthwhile person, I must be perfect at everything I do
> * If I can’t do something perfectly, I shouldn’t do it at all
> * Even minor mistakes mean a job is not complete
> * For me, things are not right if they are not perfect
> * For me, making a mistake is as bad as failing completely.
> * I must keep working until it’s done exactly right.

Thus, this is more than just doing your best to achieve good outcomes.

### References

* Moulding, R., Anglim, J., Nedeljkovic, M., Doron, G., Kyrios, M., & Ayalon, A. (2011). The Obsessive Beliefs Questionnaire (OBQ):Examination in non-clinical samples and development of a short version. Assessment, 18, 357-374.
* Myers, S. G., Fisher, P. L., & Wells, A. (2008). Belief domains of the Obsessive Beliefs Questionnaire-44 (OBQ-44) and their specific relationship with obsessive-compulsive symptoms. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 22, 475-484.
* Obsessive Compulsive Cognitions Working Group. (2001). Development and initial validation of the obsessive beliefs questionnaire and the interpretation of intrusions inventory. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 39, 987-1006.
* Obsessive Compulsive Cognitions Working Group. (2005). Psy- chometric validation of the obsessive belief questionnaire and interpretation of intrusions inventory—Part 2: Factor analyses and testing of a brief version. Behaviour Research and Ther- apy, 43, 5127-1542.
> 6 votes

# Answer
Maniacal stubbornness and perfectionism could be symptoms of **anankastic personality disorder**, classified in ICD-10 as **F.60.5**.

> Personality disorder characterized by feelings of doubt, perfectionism, excessive conscientiousness, checking and preoccupation with details, stubbornness, caution, and rigidity. There may be insistent and unwelcome thoughts or impulses that do not attain the severity of an obsessive-compulsive disorder.
>
> Personality (disorder):

* compulsive
* obsessional
* obsessive-compulsive

Source: http://apps.who.int/classifications/icd10/browse/2010/en#/F60.5

Further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsessive%E2%80%93compulsive\_personality\_disorder
> 4 votes

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Tags: abnormal-psychology, personality
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# Question
Title: What subjects to study in order to prepare for a research career in theoretical neuroscience?
Which topics in a dual degree in Cognitive science and Computer science at the graduate level or systems neuroscience (experimental + theory) graduate degree will better prepare for a research career in theoretical neuroscience?

(trying to frame it in a more objective manner, as stackexchange forums prefer that)

# Answer
> 3 votes
There are several approaches to theoretical neuroscience. I am currently taking the physics/mathematics approach: modelling the currents in neurons and coupling several neurons together through differential equations.

In Computer Science, the tendency is more towards machine learning: Bayesian statistics, artificial neural networks, signal processing, robotics, artificial intelligence. It really depends on what level you want to engage the field. For instance, if you want to study vision science, you'll want to learn more about vision and color perception and some basic physics/optics. But I also think neurochemistry and neurophysics is important, just for breadth.

Computer scientists often use the leaky integrate and fire model or rate coding models. There's something called the neural engineering framework that seeks to make networks of neurons do standard logical operations. One of their projects is SPAUN, a whole brain simulation.

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, cognitive-modeling, theoretical-neuroscience
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title: What is the psychology behind trolling?

text:
# Question
Title: What is the psychology behind trolling?
For those new to the internet, trolling is an activity where one person intentionally tries to upset other members of the same community, presumably for entertainment.

This has been informally addressed in the media, normally positing that the anonymity of the internet gives rise to more extreme behaviors,

* but is that the explanation research supports?
* And if it is, how does the process of enabling occur?
* And more broadly, why do people derive pleasure from the anger of others within the same group?
* Lastly, is this behavioral phenomenon unique to the internet era, or are there historical predecessors involving similar causal mechanisms?

# Answer
> 21 votes
There are a few references to the scientific literature on trolling in the wikipedia article

> Some psychologists have suggested that flaming would be caused by deindividuation or decreased self-evaluation: the anonymity of online postings would lead to disinhibition amongst individuals (Kiesler et al, 1984). Others have suggested that although flaming and trolling is often unpleasant, it may be a form of normative behavior that expresses the social identity of a certain user group (Lea et al, 1992; Postmes et al, 1998).

### References

* Kiesler, S. , J. Siegel and T.W. McGuire (1984). "Social psychological aspects of computer-mediated communication". American Psychologist 39 (10): 1123–1134. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.39.10.1123. LINK
* Lea, M., T. O'Shea, P. Fung and R. Spears (1992). "'Flaming' in Computer-Mediated Communication: observation, explanations, implications". Contexts of Computer-Mediated Communication: 89–112.
* Postmes, T., Spears, R., & Lea, M. (1998). "Breaching or building social boundaries? SIDE-effects of computer-mediated communication". Communication Research (25): 689–715. FREE PDF

# Answer
> 14 votes
From an article by the NY times.

> Trolling, defined as the act of posting inflammatory, derogatory or provocative messages in public forums, is a problem as old as the Internet itself, although its roots go much farther back. Even in the fourth century B.C., Plato touched upon the subject of anonymity and morality in his parable of the ring of Gyges.
>
> ...
>
> Psychological research has proven again and again that anonymity increases unethical behavior. Road rage bubbles up in the relative anonymity of one’s car. And in the online world, which can offer total anonymity, the effect is even more pronounced. People — even ordinary, good people — often change their behavior in radical ways. There’s even a term for it: the **online disinhibition effect**.

# Answer
> 11 votes
The article, "Conversation Hackers", by the International Cognition & Culture Institute describes:

> Trolls happen to possess to an extreme degree a motivation that is common to all humans: a motivation to argue. That motivation is specific to argumentation itself, and can be satisfied even when the usual goals of argumentation – convincing someone of thinking or doing something – have not been met at all. We readily argue with people we have no realistic hope of convincing. Trolls are special because 1) this motivation is very powerful in them and 2) they don't just seize occasions of satisfying it as they present themselves ; sometimes, they deliberately create these occasions, by setting up rigged conversations.

The article mentiones Sperber and Mercier's "argumentative theory" of human reasoning, which is a fascinating paper in its own right.

### References

* Mercier, H. and Sperber, D. (2011). Why do humans reason? arguments for an argumentative theory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34(02):57-74. FREE PDF

# Answer
> 6 votes
Vittorio Gallese, discoverer of the mirror neurons, says in an interview in the German weekly newspaper *Die Zeit*, that in virtual, indirect communication (as opposed to personal, face-to-face communication) there is less empathy because the mirror neurons don't get triggered as easily if we cannot witness the emotions of our conversational partners.

Paraphrase:

> What worries me more than violent computer games is the we communicate more and more fequently over telephone and computer. Communities where people come together physically are becoming increasingly rare. But we know from our experiments that for empathy it is not the same wether we see a person on a monitor or eye to eye. If you communicate with your conversational partner only over email or chat, your image of him completely disappears.
>
> If you do not face a person directly, but only listen to them on the phone or read what they write on the internet, **you can no longer feel what they feel. All you can do is attempt to cognitively *understand* how they feel, similar to an autist**. But this is much more complicated and error prone. That is why we prefer the physical company of other people, because they understand us without long explanations – simply by looking at us.

Simon Baron-Cohen, in *Zero Degrees of Empathy*, argues on the basis of his research that *empathy erosion* lies at the heart of cruelty.

In short:

**Disembodied communication hinders empathy, and thus facilitates cruelty.**

# Answer
> 4 votes
Trolling is a complex subject now under serious study in science fields (e.g. sociology, psychology, social networking, etc.), but arguably it is not new behavior. Something like it has probably existed as long as humans have, even though the term "trolling" seems to originate in cyberspace. Wikipedia etymology indicates it significantly predates cyberspace. Imagine comments or cartoons left on a public bulletin board, or even *graffiti* could be seen as a form/type of "trolling". Anonymity/pseudonymity certainly relate to it (possibly increasing it), but of course it happens even with full identification.

Certainly cyberspace seems to possess aspects that can amplify the behavior. However, people sometimes just use the word "troll" as a derogatory epithet against people they merely don't like/disagree with, or e.g. those who are sarcastic with genuine but controversial views, so it can sometimes be really difficult to classify objectively. Somewhat like other terms such as "stalker", "sexual harassment", "sexual offender" etc., it's a "hot button" term with definition that can apparently shift significantly depending on context, and that carries high charge in cyberspace & modern era. It also ties in with an increase in social awareness/sensitivity of bullying. It also has connections to gossip.

Just ran across this new scientific paper (Feb. 2014) apparently getting major media coverage that states it's correlated with what is known as the so-called "dark tetrad" of character features.

* Trolls just want to have fun. *Journal of Personality and Individual Differences,* Erin E. Buckels, Paul D. Trapnell, Delroy L. Paulhus:

> In two online studies (total $N = 1215$), respondents completed personality inventories and a survey of their Internet commenting styles. Overall, strong positive associations emerged among online commenting frequency, trolling enjoyment, and troll identity, pointing to a common construct underlying the measures. Both studies revealed similar patterns of relations between trolling and the Dark Tetrad of personality: trolling correlated positively with sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, using both enjoyment ratings and identity scores. Of all personality measures, sadism showed the most robust associations with trolling and, importantly, the relationship was specific to trolling behavior. Enjoyment of other online activities, such as chatting and debating, was unrelated to sadism. Thus cyber-trolling appears to be an Internet manifestation of everyday sadism.

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Tags: abnormal-psychology, social-psychology, internet
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# Question
Title: Is there a formal name for the "love" of arguing?
Most of people drop discussion easily. Some others don't. As if they would like to argue. They feel that they have to demonstrate something.

**Is there a formal trait to describe people who enjoy arguing and the behavior of enjoying an argument?**

# Answer
> 1 votes
I can't think of any clinical term for it, but a contentious individual is one who is eager to fight. Another term, pugnacious, is a little less derogatory than contentious.

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Tags: social-psychology, personality
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# Question
Title: What topics are included in theoretical cognitive science?
What topics would fall under theoretical cognitive science, if there could be such a term? I am referring to the more mathematical, foundational topics vs. topics dealing with specific cognitive phenomena.

# Answer
I would imagine that artificial intelligence and any other kind of cognitive modelling of behaviour or the brain would fall under that category. Essentially, anything that isn't about directly describing human behaviour, but is about modelling it computationally.

Look up the research on Theoretical Neuroscience, it's really quite fascinating. There is also an going project about literally building a brain: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue\_Brain\_Project

It's really neat stuff.
> 1 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, philosophy-of-mind
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# Question
Title: How is music preference related to personality traits or particular qualities?
I'm a big music enthusiast myself, and one thing I noticed about myself, and not exactly about other people, is that I don't have any music genre I prefer listening to. For example, I don't mind it being rock, rap, techno or any music genre for that matter. As long as the beat is catchy, the quality of execution is there, and I can enjoy listening to it, I'll do so.

Hence, I've been wondering if there is any correlation between people liking certain kinds of genres and having certain qualities, skills or personality traits? For example, are people who like certain genres more creative or outgoing?

# Answer
As your luck would have it, there is a study by Schwartz et al. (2003) that examines just that.

They found that there was a specific personality type associated with music preference in adolescents. The paper is freely available on familywise.ca.

<sub> Schwartz, K. D., & Fouts, G. T. (2003). Music preferences, personality style, and developmental issues of adolescents. Journal of youth and adolescence, 32(3), 205-213. (PDF) </sub>
> 4 votes

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Tags: personality, music
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# Question
Title: Does explaining a visual guidance system affect visual attention distribution?
I'm working on a driving simulator that uses an eyetracker to monitor the users gaze behavior. Based on a study I modeled an optimal scanpath that the users should follow in order to best maneuver through curves. If the users gaze hasn't hit certain AoIs in time, a visual cue is being shown to manipulate the user to include this point in his scanpath.

My question is, should I explain the meaning of the cues and the system behind them to the testers? Wouldn't that bias their scanning behavior?

# Answer
> 1 votes
Whether you tell them is going to depend on what you are trying to accomplish. What is the nature of the cues? If they capture strictly exogenous attention, what you tell won't affect how they allocate their attention because orienting is completely involuntary. However, if the cues involve your participants having to decide to redirect their attention, explaining it to them will affect how they allocate their attention and will likely lead to them relying more on your cues.

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Tags: experimental-psychology, attention, eye-movement
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# Question
Title: What is an effective way of working with core beliefs/schemas?
In CBT one of the core concepts is ANTs (automatic negative thoughts) that form the basis of depressive feelings: they are repetitive, conscious, mostly ungrounded negative thoughts about one's existence, talents, capabilities, etc. Most applied CBT literature discusses how to get rid of these thoughts and replace them with more realistic or at least more positive ones.

ANTs don't exist by themselves though; they derive from core beliefs or schemas that are quite elusive and often unconscious (unlike ANTs). Currently I've read the following books on the subject: *Schema Therapy* by Young et al., *Schema Therapy: Distinctive Features* by Eshkol et al., and a few articles, which helped me identify some of them.

Is there any good literature on working with ANTs? I'm especially interested in cases when ANTs are not particularly evident, so it's quite hard to identify them. It's almost like it's subconsciousness, but of course it is not.

# Answer
I'm lucky enough to know a counselor-in-training whose preferred modality is CBT; here's what she suggested.

Identifying those core beliefs is indeed the important part. Useful tools include the CBT Thought Record worksheet, which pretty well explains itself, and the downward arrow technique illustrated in this figure:

(Trader, 2011).

One less-than-self-evident trick in applying these methods is refusing to take "I don't know" for an answer – it's a cop-out, my counselor connection says! Assuming this works well enough, and that you can get to the core belief more or less, you can then check a list like Grohol's (2009) for help in identifying the particular cognitive distortion at hand. He also lists Beck (1976) and Burns (1980) as references on these theories. The work of Aaron T. Beck covers very many angles of CBT, and so would be good to study for further details. As Wikipedia says, "He is regarded as the father of cognitive therapy," so you probably can't go wrong with anything he's written.

Bringing these core beliefs to the conscious "surface" is a very good start. ANTs have a lot more power when they're preconscious (not "subconscious", BTW; see https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/q/992/4086), because at this level, they have plenty of emotional impact but receive little or no rational scrutiny. When a person actually states a core belief aloud, that belief might not sound so reasonable, because the believer has to process the belief more deeply and consciously, which engages the error-checking cognitive mechanisms that an unconscious belief does not.

Sometimes hearing oneself speak the belief aloud is enough to realize that it doesn't make sense, and to start catching oneself in the act of reacting emotionally to unreasonable ANTs. Further therapy is necessary sometimes, and often more can help. For instance, the first question a therapist might ask in response to the core belief in the above figure could be, "I hear you expressing a very broad belief about yourself: you don't seem to think you have ever succeeded at anything. Am I understanding you correctly?" That's a very gentle response style based on reflective listening; do you see how it does more than simply repeat the client's words back to him/her? If someone can say, "I am a failure at everything!" with a straight face, hopefully he/she at least can't say, "Yes, it's correct that I've never succeeded at anything." I don't think that's true of anyone.

If the client still can't see this, the therapist may have to up the ante a bit. One generally has to stop short of calling one's client a deluded fool, but various modalities take differing perspectives on confrontationality in talk therapy. Other usual precautions in counseling apply, but within the boundaries of accepted practice, whether differences in therapeutic style produce different outcomes is an open, empirical question, and will depend largely on the character of the client in question. Further detail is probably beyond the scope of this answer.

**References**
\- Beck, A. T. (1976). *Cognitive therapies and emotional disorders*. New York: New American Library.
\- Burns, D. D. (1980). *Feeling good: The new mood therapy*. New York: New American Library.
\- Grohol, J. (2009). 15 common cognitive distortions. *Psych Central.* Retrieved on March 7, 2014, from http://psychcentral.com/lib/15-common-cognitive-distortions/0002153.
\- Trader, A. (2011). A meeting of minds. *Cultivating the garden of the heart: Patristic counsel and cognitive techniques for schema reconstruction* (1st ed., chapter 9, pp. 217–250). Peter Lang Publishing. Retrieved from http://www.oodegr.com/english/psyxotherap/cognitive\_therapy.htm.
P.S. Thanks Andréa!
> 5 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, emotion, unconscious, automaticity
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# Question
Title: What is the cognitive mechanism that creates strong feelings, from environmental organization and appearance?
After doing a home remodel, I leaned that within the interior design community, most professionals refer to their work by the "**vibe**", "**energy**" and "**feeling**" their design of a room (or house) creates, within the individual occupying the property.

A simple example, a wood log cabin designed home creates a very different "feel/vibe" than a sleek modern home.

Cognitively speaking, what exactly is this "vibe" and "energy" that is referred to and what is happening within an individual that causes it?

Also, are some people more sensitive to the "vibe" the environment gives off and why?

Any help is appreciated.

# Answer
I wouldn't take these terms too literally. I'm no interior designer, so I can't really rule out special meanings within the trade, but my impression of common usage is that these are informal, rough synonyms for the emotions evoked by the aesthetic characteristics of an environment. Urban Dictionary may be an unlikely source for an authoritative definition of ***vibe***, but I'm inclined to endorse this particular definition anyway:

> (Noun)A distinctive emotional atmosphere; sensed intuitively.
>
> *"It gave me a nostalgic vibe".
"That man gives off bad vibes"*

From this, it's apparent that emotions and intuition play a role in "vibe" perception. Emotion is fairly basic in phenomenology, so it seems sufficient to say that stimuli that provoke emotion can thus be said to possess or influence "vibes". The additional specification of intuition implies to me that the experience is somewhat beyond the person's complete, rational comprehension. Maybe some subjective sense of confusion, uncertainty, or non-rational (though not necessarily *irrational*) processing is also inherent in the experience of a "vibe". As a snide aside, there's at least some confusion implicit in the misapplication of vibration and (electromagnetic? thermal? paranormal?) "energy" as metaphors for aesthetic *qualia*. This is probably the philosophical equivalent of what they mean to say, and much more carefully defined.

IMHO, your second question is much more interesting. Indeed some people may be more sensitive to "vibes" or qualia. A lesser-known personality trait I've always found really fascinating is absorption. It subsumes several interesting tendencies involving attention responsiveness and regulation, including:

* Intensity of experiences, both real and imagined
* Capacity for the *flow* experience of deep task engagement and loss of self-awareness
* Susceptibility to hypnotism, daydreaming, nightmares, and psychopharmacological effects

Absorption relates strongly to openness, which is much better known as a personality trait. Supposedly composed of six facets (these are somewhat more a matter of debate), openness relates to absorption primarily through the fantasy, feelings, and aesthetics facets (Glisky, Tataryn, Tobias, Kihlstrom, & McConkey, 1991). Again, I can't say for sure, but I'd bet that these feelings and aesthetics facets would be particularly relevant to individual differences in the sort of sensitivity you have in mind.

**Reference**
Glisky, M. L., Tataryn, D. J., Tobias, B. A., Kihlstrom, J. F., & McConkey, K. M. (1991). Absorption, openness to experience, and hypnotizability. *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60*(2), 263–272.
> 2 votes

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Tags: emotion
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# Question
Title: What are ways to explore metamathematics from a cognitive science/neuroscience lens?
What are ways to explore metamathematics from a cognitive science/neuroscience lens to understand the evolution of mathematics based on structural and perceptual processing biases introduced due to our cognition?

What kind of work has been done/can be done to inform metamathematics from cognitive science? Who are some leading researchers and/or important works to read?

Assumption: Mathematics is invented, not discovered; so it is not Platonic.

# Answer
> 3 votes
You'll be interested in Where Mathematics Comes From, by George Lakoff and Rafael E. Núñez. Lakoff & Núñez argue that all of our mathematical concepts are based on some kind of conceptual metaphor, where we take the rules of a domain that we understand intuitively and apply them into a new, mathematical context. For example, the concept of "motion along a path" gives us the concept of a number line, which in turn provides a natural way to think about negative numbers:

> Moreover, this metaphor provides a natural extension to negative numbers - let the origin be somewhere on a pathway extending indefinitely in both directions. The negative numbers will be the point-locations on the other side of zero from the positive numbers along the same path. This extension was explicitly made by Rafael Bombelli in the second half of the sixteenth century. In Bombelli's extension of the point-location metaphor for numbers, positive numbers, zero, and negative numbers are all point-locations on a line. This made it commonplace for European mathematicians to think and speak of the concept of a number *lying between* two other numbers - as in *zero lies between minus one and one*. Conceptualizing all (real) numbers metaphorically as point-locations on the same line was crucial to providing a uniform understanding of number. These days, it is hard to imagine that there was ever a time when such a metaphor was not commonly accepted by mathematicians! (Lakoff & Núñez, p. 73)

Lakoff & Núñez explicitly argue that all of human mathematics is created by the application of human-specific cognitive machinery and culture, and that the mathematics of an alien species might look very different.

The following references might or might not be useful for purposes of metamathematics, but mentioning them anyway since I happen to have them at hand from a course on number cognition that I took some years back: Piazza et al. (2007) and Brannon (2006) on how numbers are represented in the brain, Carey (2004) on how children come to learn the concept of integers, Frank et al. (2008) on numbers as a cognitive technology, and Gallistel et al. (2006) for an argument that real numbers rather than integers are what the brain represents.

Personally I also think that an extraordinarily interesting paper is Dehaene & Cohen (2007), which argues that the existence of specialized neuronal circuitry for purposes such as arithmetic and reading is possible because our culture has managed to "hijack" pre-existing circuits which originally evolved for other purposes:

> The neuronal recycling hypothesis consists of the following postulates:
>
> 1. Human brain organization is subject to strong anatomical and connectional constraints inherited from evolution. Organized neural maps are present early on in infancy and bias subsequent learning.
> 2. Cultural acquisitions (e.g., reading) must find their “neuronal niche,” a set of circuits that are sufficiently close to the required function and sufficiently plastic as to reorient a significant fraction of their neural resources to this novel use.
> 3. As cortical territories dedicated to evolutionarily older functions are invaded by novel cultural objects, their prior organization is never entirely erased. Thus, prior neural constraints exert a powerful influence on cultural acquisition and adult organization.

If you accepted these postulates, then arguably the neural constraints of the older circuits might considerably bias the way that human mathematics is carried out.

**References**

Brannon, E.M. (2006) The representation of numerical magnitude. Curr Opin Neurobiol. Apr 2006; 16(2): 222–229. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1626588/

Carey, S. (2004) Bootstrapping & the origin of concepts. Daedalus, Winter 2004. http://hum.uchicago.edu/ck0/kennedy/classes/s09/experimentalsemantics/carey04.pdf

Dehaene, S. & Cohen, L. (2007) Cultural Recycling of Cortical Maps. Neuron, Volume 56, Issue 2, Pages 384–398. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627307007593

Frank, M.C. & Everett, D.L. & Fedorenko, E. & Gibson, E. (2008) Number as a cognitive technology: Evidence from Pirahã language and cognition. Cognition 108, 819-824. http://www.letras.ufrj.br/poslinguistica/recursion/papers/18-frank-et-al.pdf

Gallistel, C.R. & Gelman, R. & Cordes, S. (2006) The Cultural and Evolutionary History of the Real Numbers. Culture and evolution. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. http://hum.uchicago.edu/ck0/kennedy/classes/s09/experimentalsemantics/gallistel-etal05.pdf

Lakoff, G. & Núñez, R.E. (2001) Where Mathematics Come From: How The Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics Into Being. Basic Books.

Piazza, M. & Pinel, P. & Bihan, D.L. & Dehaene, S. (2007) A Magnitude Code Common to Numerosities and Number Symbols in Human Intraparietal Cortex. Neuron 53, 293–305. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627306009895

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, theoretical-neuroscience
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# Question
Title: Does it take more cognitive effort to tell the time when reading a digital clock instead of analog?
Following a question on UX.Stackexchange about whether or not to use an analog or digital clock on a website from a user-interface perspective it occurs to me that there is probably a psychological difference between using one or the other.

My hypothesis is that it takes longer to know the time when reading digital instead of analog because as children we are taught to understand time via analog clocks (5 past, half past, quarter to etc) so when confronted with a digital clock we have to do some internal calculations to convert from digital numbers into a mental analog clock before we actually understand what the time is. (*"07:47, ok so if 07:45 is quarter-to that means it's now half-way between quarter-to and ten-to eight..."*).

However I'm aware this may just be my own internal process I'm citing rather than being how people in general use clocks so I'm interested to know if my hypothesis is actually supported / disproved.

# Answer
The answer depends of course on the factors mentioned in the comments; however, one important factor to consider is the intended purpose of reading the clock.

An analog clock presents information in graphical form, in a similar way to how a pie chart might present information. This is opposed to a digital clock, which presents symbolic information, in a similar way to what might be found in a table of values.

**Cognitive Fit Theory** According to research by Iris Vessey (*cognitive fit theory,*) the least cognitive effort will be required when the presentation format of the data matches the intended cognitive use. Vessey's research shows that symoblic information, such as that presented by a digital clock, is best when one needs to evaluate a single number (for example, to answer the question "What time is it now?"). On the other hand, graphical information, such as that presented by the analog clock, is best when one desires to make a comparison between different numbers (for example, to answer the question "How much time has elapsed?").

Therefore, your example in the question (how much time has elapsed past the hour) is best answered with an analog clock, whereas if I want to know what time my alarm is set for, the digital clock on my cell phone is a better format.

I might argue that the analog clock format does not do a good job presenting the graphical information, but that is best saved for another paper.
> 7 votes

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Tags: time
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# Question
Title: Is it hard to change people's beliefs without resorting to marketing techniques? And if so, why?
**Background**:

> Dale Carnegie was the developer of famous courses in self-improvement, salesmanship, corporate training, public speaking, and interpersonal skills. He was the author of How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), a massive bestseller that remains popular today.

The thesis explained in the book are really well synthesized in the Wikipedia page.

> Don't criticize, condemn, or complain. Give honest and sincere appreciation. Smile. Remember that a person's name is, to that person, the sweetest and most important sound in any language. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves. Talk in terms of the other person's interest. Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely.

The strategies don't talk about telling the truth, presenting rational arguments, and citing the sources.

Cognitive Psychology explains the reasons behind this:

* *Confirmation bias*
* *Backfire Effect*
* *self-serving bias*
* *Rationalization*
* *Cognitive dissonance*

All of these terms suggest that changing people's ideas requires an effort in a direction that is not *rational*.

### Question

* **Why is it hard to change other's people beliefs?**
* **Is it true that marketing strategies are more effective than rational argument in changing other's beliefs?**

Refer also to:

# Answer
> 1 votes
## Mu

The question is like a tautology - *ALL* effective ways of changing people's beliefs would automatically be valid marketing techniques, pretty much by definition. Marketing is not a subset of all possible techniques, it's a discipline on using all those for the specific purpose of marketing goods/services.

Rational argument is also a classic marketing technique, in areas where you have a clear rational advantage over your competitors, you want to nudge customers to situations and environments where they would not be 'thinking emotionally', hear your rational argument clearly, and thus choose the way you want them to.

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Tags: cognitive-psychology
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# Question
Title: What are the dangers of using mindfulness-based techniques for individuals suffering from Schizophrenia?
I am unable to find much research on the application of mindfulnesss for those suffering from Schizophrenia. A recent study by Chien and Lee (2013) focuses on the application of a psychoeducation program for Chinese patients with Schizophrenia. However, I do not have the pleasure of reading this but findings indicate that it can improve psychosocial functioning (http://www.cme.psychiatryonline.org/article.aspx?articleID=1653271).

Though the study show promising results for alleviating symptoms in Schizophrenic patients, I feel - *prima facie* \- that there might be a risk in exacerbating symptoms by educating Schizophrenic patients to adopt a non-judgmental awareness towards positive symptoms such as hallucinations and delusional thinking. I am a supporter of mindfulness-based interventions except I can't seem to find much literature on its limitations and risks for Schizophrenia.

As the neurological and biological evidence around Schizophrenia is far from conclusive, I am narrowing this down to only psychological and ethical risks/dangers that could potentially arise from mindfulness practice and Schizophrenic individuals. For clarity around the theory underpinning Schizophrenia, I would refer to the *Theory of Mind* as the overarching philosophical foundation for understanding Schizophrenia and interactions with mindfulness practice. A definition is given by Pedersen et al (2012):

> "Theory of mind (ToM), the ability to think about mental states such as thoughts and beliefs in oneself and others, is a complex cognitive function that requires the integration of information from multiple sources. Substantial evidence has accumulated that patients with schizophrenia have impaired ToM functions (Sprong et al., 2007; Bora et al., 2009) that result in social-interactive deﬁcits."

On a cognitive perspective, what dangers does mindfulness pose to a Schizophrenic individual's ability to discern their self-concept and their relations with the world?

**Example**

This is purely for illustrative purposes.

*X suffers from Schizophrenia and visual hallucinations. X does engage in mindfulness practice regularly. His/her mindfulness practice involves paying non-judgmental attention in the present moment. Initially, X paid too much attention to the occasional visual hallucinations through his mindfulness exercises. This triggered a higher amount of distress and anxiety for X and caused him/her to believe in the 'reality' of the hallucination. It could be said that there may be a potential danger that existed in the initial stages of X's introduction to mindfulness practice.*

**Questions**

1. What are the dangers of using mindfulness-based techniques for individuals suffering from Schizophrenia?
2. What are the mechanisms that make mindfulness practice effective when an individual is experiencing a delusional episode?

**EDIT:**

I have provided some more information around the scope of the question primarily around what type of 'dangers' could result from the interaction between mindfulness practice and those suffering from Schizophrenia.

**References**

Chien, W.T., Lee, I.Y.M. (2013). The mindfulness-based psychoeducation program for Chinese patients with schizophrenia. *Psychiatric Services 2013*

# Answer
> 3 votes
I cannot answer your question, because I'm not an expert on schizophrenia, but I would like to point out that the answer will depend on your theory of schizophrenia.

Post-mortem research on the brains of schizophrenic patients has found consistent anomalies:

* widening of the ventricles (meaning a loss of subcortical brain cells)
* structural abnormalities in the subcortical temporal-limbic areas such as the hyppocampus and basal ganglia
* structural abnormalities in the prefrontal and temporal cortex

CT and MRI research on the brains of living schizophrenics has found similar anomalies:

* enlarged ventricles
* loss of cortical substance in the temporal and frontal areas
* reduced volume in the basal ganglia (nucleus caudatus) and limbic structures

It appears that there is a general atrophy of brain tissue in schizophrenics, and from my non-expert knowledge there is nothing you can do to reverse this. Typical therapy in schizophrenia (today) is to give anti-psychotica to reduce symptoms, behavioral therapy to enhance social abilities, and family therapy to reduce hostility, excessive worrying etc. ("expressed emotion" plays a role in the etiology of schizophrenia). So basically what you do is not "heal" the disorder but alleviate the symptoms and help the patients with their everyday problems.

Since cognitive behavioral therapy (in which the patient is encouraged to consciously deal with his thoughts, including, I'd guess, the paranoic ones) is a normal part of clinical routine with schizophrenia, I don't see why mindfulness could not be beneficial. I believe it might well enhance the CBT in the same way as in the therapy of depression, where mindfulness and CBT are successfully applied in conjunction.

# Answer
> 1 votes
To be honest I think it can be very beneficial. Mindfulness is not concentrating on thoughts; it's accepting and labeling thoughts so they can go away.

For example, when someone feels anxiety coming up, they can label it as 'thoughts' and let it go. Labeling thoughts makes them emotionally neutral and stops more thinking about them, therefore it's much easier to let them go drift away. When you have labeled the thought, you should focus on how your belly moves with each breath, so you are totally in this moment again (mindfulness). If you focus on or fight the thoughts, you will make them much worse (the 'don't think of a polar bear' principle).

Stress, panic, anxiety, and depression all have to do either with your past or your future; your past has happened and can't be changed, but your future has not happened yet and can be changed by acting this moment. So live in this moment! Enjoy everything you do, see, hear, feel, taste, and smell at this moment! Negative mental states can only occur by focusing on your past or future, and therefore you will not be able to enjoy the beauty of the present!

This way of thinking can be pretty helpful for schizophrenic patients, since depression, anxiety and stress (this can even trigger an episode) is very common amongst them. Maybe they can even let go of some 'positive symptoms' like delusions when they feel them coming up. Instead of indirectly investing in them by paying attention to them, just don't let the delusions develop. This can be very helpful in combination with a therapist specialised in reality-testing therapy.

# Answer
> 0 votes
I agree with the commenter from Sep. 24, 16:19, except for one point: just because schizophrenic hallucinations are organic does not preclude them from changing through mindfulness. In our current understanding, all mentation is organic, yet we clearly exert conscious influence on thoughts, emotion, and even perception; otherwise all psychotherapy would be useless.

Coeus, it seems like your apprehension may be due to an incomplete understanding of mindfulness and mindfulness training. When dealing with disturbing content, an approach similar to exposure therapy is advised, i.e., gradually ramping up exposure to said content. Furthermore, a key aspect of mindfulness training is nonreaction and nonjudgment; mental experience is to be regarded not as objective but as fleeting, subjective, and ultimately illusory. That said, this is the major challenge with schizophrenia, and it's entirely possible that someone in the midst of psychosis will simply not possess the presence of mind to adapt such a decentered stance.

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, abnormal-psychology
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title: How to change someone's beliefs?

text:
# Question
Title: How to change someone's beliefs?
I tried to change my brother's beliefs. He gets motivated by some bad ideas. Following my attempt to change his beliefs, his beliefs have become even stronger.

# Answer
> 6 votes
It's a little unclear to me from what you've said that your efforts are truly affecting your brother's ideas. It's also unclear whether those ideas are objectively bad, or whether you should be trying to change them. In general, we have to be careful to avoid recommending specific actions for specific people here.

That being said, the general phenomenon you seem to describe is *reactance*. Excerpts from Wikipedia:

> Reactance is a motivational reaction to offers, persons, rules, or regulations that threaten or eliminate specific behavioral freedoms \[(Brehm, 1966; Brehm & Brehm, 1981)\]. Reactance occurs when a person feels that someone or something is taking away his or her choices or limiting the range of alternatives.
>
> **Reactance can occur when someone is heavily pressured to accept a certain view or attitude. Reactance can cause the person to adopt or strengthen a view or attitude that is contrary to what was intended, and also increases resistance to persuasion**. People using reverse psychology are playing on at least an informal awareness of reactance, attempting to influence someone to choose the opposite of what they request...
>
> According to William R. Miller \[(2000),\] "Research demonstrates that a counselor can drive resistance (denial) levels up and down dramatically according to his or her personal counseling style". **Use of a "respectful, reflective approach" described in motivational interviewing and applied as motivation enhancement therapy, rather than by argumentation, the accusation of "being in denial", and direct confrontations, lead to the motivation to change and avoid the resistance and denial, or reactance, elicited by strong direct confrontation** \[(Miller & Rollnick, 1991)\]...
>
> Silvia's 2005 study *Deflecting reactance: The role of similarity in increasing compliance and reducing resistance* concluded that one way to increase the activity of a threatened freedom is to censor it, or provide a threatening message toward the activity. In turn a "**boomerang effect**" occurs, in which people choose forbidden alternatives. This study also shows that **social influence has better results when it does not threaten one's core freedoms**. Two concepts revealed in this study are that a communicator may be able to increase the positive force towards compliance by **increasing their credibility, and that increasing the positive communication force and decreasing the negative communication force simultaneously should increase compliance** \[(Silvia, 2005)\].

You may want to follow some of the hyperlinks above. They're all useful concepts for this issue, and may help you understand what you're doing and what your alternatives are. As a general principle, counselors and therapists avoid trying to change others' beliefs and attitudes explicitly and directly. Instead, they focus on understanding their clients, and in the process, they prompt their clients to reexamine themselves and find their own reasons to change. It's subtle yet impressive social jujutsu.

**References**

 \- Brehm, J. W. (1966). *A theory of psychological reactance*. Academic Press.
\- Brehm, S. S., & Brehm, J. W. (1981). *Psychological reactance: A theory of freedom and control*. Academic Press.
\- Miller, W. R. (2000) Motivational enhancement therapy: Description of counseling approach. In J. J. Boren, L. S. Onken, & K. M. Carroll (Eds.), *Approaches to Drug Abuse Counseling* (pp. 89–93). National Institute on Drug Abuse.
\- Miller, W.R. & Rollnick, S. (1991). *Motivational interviewing: Preparing people to change addictive behavior.* New York: Guilford Press.
\- Silvia, P. J. (2005). Deflecting reactance: The role of similarity in increasing compliance and reducing resistance. *Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 27*, 277–284. Retrieved from http://www.niu.edu/user/tj0bjs1/psyc624/Silvia%20%282005%29.pdf.

# Answer
> 1 votes
I would like to put an answer based on my experience in training and coaching others. I used to shoot small video conversations (up to 5 min) and than we analyzed carefully. Analysis took up to 30-40 min. By doing this we could see every small emotional changes during argumentation/communication process.

After 2 years of such experience I can say that **the most common mistakes are**:

* when opponents are not ready to change their own position.

Competitive position provokes competition in 50% of cases. So if one wants to influence important to be open to others position. It is hard but really helps to establish partnership and trust.

* when opponents react and concentrate only at that things said by other you don't agree with. You listen until hearing something to disagree with then you stop listening and start arguing.

It increases stress. It is better to find things to which you both can agree. There are always some points but usually we forget about them especially under high emotions.

* concentration on rational arguments while preparing to talk and while communicating.

By this you can forget about the person in front of you, about his/her emotional state which is more important than any rational arguments. He or she may be angry at you and hardly listen. To avoid this important to react at your opponents reactions. See him/her nodding or having sceptical grimace? Ask, talk about it.

Otherwise its only in your own head you are a winner with the best arguments ;)

* when an object of discussion is not reconciled clearly.

Its important to clarify all the details: opponents positions, logics etc.

* dominating by using "smart" words, phrase constructions etc.

Any type of dominating can provoke negative emotions.

When you start your communication with strong assumptions that someone beliefs are bad and wrong one can feel it and start to protect it.

Partnership, openness, trust, respect, clarity helps to persuade others. The key is attention to emotions of your partner, we are not so rational as we wish to look like. When you really want to understand him/her position it feels and that is where your dialog can start. It sounds simple and even as some basic stuff but it works both in persuading and in establishing good relationship.

# Answer
> 0 votes
For the most part, you don't change people's beliefs. When deeply held beliefs change, it is often due to a change in self image and often triggers further change in self image.

So, asking someone to change deeply held beliefs is tantamount to asking them to change who they are. I agree with the previous replies that you should really question your desire to change someone at that level.

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, social-psychology, abnormal-psychology, motivation, experimental-psychology
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# Question
Title: .Do students learn better when challenged (specifically, in math education)?
Originally posted on Math.SE, but it was suggested cogsci.SE would be a more suitable venue.

I'm aware of two publications that have trickled onto the radar screens of non-specialists:

The former focuses on the impact of "disfluency" on retention and success when processing written material, and the latter seems to focus on learning in the case where preexisting misconceptions need to be corrected (physics).

I'm interested to hear about similar research results in the learning of abstract concepts, specifically mathematics.

The motivation described in the original question on Math.SE is the fact that many mathematicians seem to hold the (painful, to students) belief that forcing students to struggle (in some sense) is beneficial. I've quoted multiple examples of this attitude from various sources in the original question, you are welcome to have a look.

Does current research support the belief that (in mathematics) difficult learning is better learning? This might be in terms of retention, long-term achievements, motivation, etc'.

**Update**

I've posted an expanded form of the question on matheducators.SE beta: https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/questions/875/

Still hoping for helpful answers from the cogsci.SE community.

# Answer
Let me begin by saying that the answer is nowhere near as simple as you or I would like it to be. There are several reasons for this, but the main reason is that there are myriad ways that students can struggle through the material.

I became interested in this subject when I was a graduate teaching assistant in the Industrial Engineering program at Iowa State. One of the classes that I taught dealt with the concept of measurement variation, which inescapably includes several important statistical concepts, which to me (having had four advanced statistics/methods courses) were painfully obvious; however, my students had no hope whatsoever. When lab report grading time came around, I was very disappointed to see that even my brightest students completely missed the point of the experiment, `<sarcasm>` despite my obviously brilliant instruction `</sarcasm>`.

So, I set out to do research and conduct experiments into exactly *why* my students had trouble with this material. I've written two papers on the subject (with a third in-work). Here are some of my general findings:

1. The learning process depends upon the learner (pre-existing knowledge and conceptions), the material (type and difficulty), and the teaching method. These three interact in a complex way, as several researchers have explored. The most comprehensive set of literature on this can be found by searching `Cognitive Load Theory`.
2. `Problem-based learning` (which is what @JohnYetter describes in his answer) has been proven to be a highly effective teaching method for science and math *when executed properly.* Proper execution of PBL requires that students are familiar with the method, and my studies have shown that *properly-designed* scaffolding (things that help guide the process and point out key concepts) is a significant, essential component.
3. Lecture does not appear to have any effect on learning (at least for measurement variation and the related concepts), and may actually harm the learning process (this is what I am studying further right now).

The theories agree that the reason PBL is effective is that it forces students to make the necessary schematic connections to build their knowledge. The intent of the process is to take novices and begin to develop their knowledge base such that it functions more like an experts' knowledge base (there are proven differences between how novices and experts explore problems). Along with this, I think that you need to have a particular type of student, one who has self-discipline and doesn't give up. Such students are well-suited for engineering and science; students who don't possess these abilities or who are not capable of rapidly adapting find themselves on the way over to a non-technical degree (so my studies of engineering students only automatically exclude this population of students, which is another piece I need to study further).
> 3 votes

# Answer
I have an anecdotal answer with regard to learning Physics. I sat in on a colloquium where a Physics professor discussed his experience with a course that was taught completely through experimentation. Students had to derive their learning of Physics completely through semi-guided experiments, and no lecture. In the beginning of the course, the professor reports that students found the process very tedious. However, as they got the knack for experimentation, they enjoyed it more, and retained their learning exceptionally.

In this case, I think that struggle can lead to better learning. If you personally derive a concept from first hand experimentation, you are very likely to remember it. In that case, you are not learning science, you are learning to be a scientist. That distinction between learning about versus learning to be almost always deepens understanding, and consequently recall.

On the other hand, this does not apply to struggle for struggle sake. It seems likely that there are some teaching methods that require students to struggle, and actually work. Yet there may be other methods where the struggle is fruitless.
> 2 votes

# Answer
Robert Bjork calls this desirable difficulties. That is, students seems to learn best when they are required to encode and retrieve information. Some examples of desirable difficulties include: testing, spacing/interleaving, generating information, changing studying environments, etc. In the long run, these seem to promote long term learning.
> 2 votes

# Answer
Norman Triplett's research on social facilitation shows, that people tend to be better in simple tasks or physical activity (cyclists were faster) in presence of others. However, in cases such as solving mathematical tasks, quantity of tasks solved increases, while the quality decreases (social loafing). The answer therefore depends on whether you use "be better than all these people" challenge or "show yourself you're the best" challenge. Most of the researches, however, show that motivating or challenging students causes rather stress and tension than better results.
> 1 votes

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Tags: educational-psychology, mathematical-ability
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# Question
Title: Sense of time: Evaluation and correlation with psychological traits and states
Some of us are often in hurry and always late. Some make mistakes while evaluating time-needs for tasks. How is our sense of time connected with our personality? Is it more correlated with the process we are involved in? How we can develop this sense so to make more of our time?

# Answer
People who are entitled tend to have a slower perception of time. In any given situation, a person can feel some level of entitlement. If a person is waiting in line for 10 minutes to check out groceries, he would experience that 10 minutes as passing by very slowly. On the other hand, if that same person was waiting 10 minutes to meet the President, he would experience the 10 minutes as passing by quickly.

So time perception can be manipulated in any given situation. It depends on the level of entitlement you are feeling in that environment. Perhaps entitlement could artificially be manipulated to create different perceptions of time (e.g. by thinking quickly and variably).

**Source**

*Time Crawls When You're Not Having Fun: Feeling Entitled Makes Dull Tasks Drag On*. Edward H. O'Brien, Phyllis A. Anastasio and Brad J. Bushman, Pers Soc Psychol Bull published online 12 May 2011, DOI: 10.1177/0146167211408922
> 3 votes

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Tags: social-psychology, personality, time, correlation, behavior
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# Question
Title: Can attention be improved to reduce the frequency of mistakes?
There is a class of error that is sometimes colloquially referred to as "not paying attention". These are the sorts of error where the subject knows the correct way to perform a task, but fails to follow it due to a lapse in whatever mental process is responsible for ensuring that actions are carried out according to intention.

Some examples are:

* A mathematically competent adult solving an advanced math problem incorrectly because of a simple arithmetic mistake, such as 5+3=15.
* A well-prepared student getting a multiple choice question wrong because it was asking "which of the above are not true", but she mistakenly selected the ones that are true.
* A skilled roboticist damaging an expensive circuit because he accidentally wired the components incorrectly.
* Mixing up two terms which refer to different things, despite understanding very well the concept that either term refers to.
* Typos and simple grammar errors.

Note that I do not necessarily mean attention in the sense of being able to concentrate on and pay attention to a topic. I am specifically talking about the ability to not make mistakes (where mistakes are simple errors, which the subject is capable of recognizing as errors, but happens not to *in that particular instance* \- not errors committed because of imperfect knowledge, understanding, or reasoning). Thus, "mistakes" are:

* Not reproducible: If the subject is asked to repeat the task, they will probably do it correctly.
* Unrecognized: The subject believes that the task was completed correctly, until explicitly checked.
* Paradoxical: If asked about how the task should be performed, the subject answers correctly - but occasionally fails to perform as described.
* Mental: The mistake is not due to failures in fine motor control but has to do with the output of the mind. The mistake may be due to incorrect interpretation of sensory stimulus, but not due to an overt corruption of the stimulus itself (a person with good vision "misreading a word" in a brightly lit room from a black on white page with a suitably large font counts, but trying to read by starlight on a moonless light doesn't).

**So, my question: Is there scientific research dealing with "attention" in this sense (ability to make few mistakes)? What factors influence it? Can it be trained, or is it an innate, invariant quality of a person that can only be accepted and accommodated?**

Also, I am asking specifically about "healthy and normal adults", not disorders such as ADHD (unless the pathology helps elucidate the healthy case). As the saying goes, to err is human - but some humans err more than others, and I am interested in understanding why (and what strategies are available to reduce this tendency).

(edited from my original question on Academia.SE)

# Answer
Sounds like a class of faults resulting mainly from a common sequence: habituation, automation, assimilation, discrimination error.

1. **Habituation.** The tasks you describe are generally simple, ordinary, and as you say, there is a "correct" way to do them that is known. This would encourage a heuristic-based approach to problem-solving response generation. Heuristics are generally not foolproof, but they're fast and relatively effortless. Suits these "mindless" tasks well when there are lots to do that just need doing.
2. **Automation****.** The easier and more routine a task becomes is the more one will handle it without conscious, deliberate thought: i.e., without attention to detail or inhibition of first-impression-based impulses. One focuses instead on other decisions or plans; there's always the rest of the week to look forward to or worry about, and the task at hand is so boring that focusing on it is aversive.
3. **Assimilation****.** Rote task performance that thus motivates diversion of attention for the sake of both efficiency and entertainment thereby encourages assimilation of new stimuli. In many ways, this process actually comes first, leading to habituation and automation. I bring it up now to transition my focus from the learning processes to the case-by-case response pattern that results. Assimilation is the foundation of habituation and automation, but it also results, as these are the processes of self-reinforcing feedback from assimilation decisions. More simply stated, when assimilation happens often, habits form. As habits flourish, automaticity sets in. At this point, one almost always chooses to assimilate a new scenario into existing schemas; it's harder to resist the urge.
4. **Discrimination error.** Motivated inattention and hastened task processing inhibits accommodation. Thus when one operates on an imperfect heuristic (that may be redundant), applying incomplete schemas to new situations that are not represented accurately in these classes of supposedly known problems leads to errors. E.g., seeing a ton of multiplication problems might bias one toward ignoring the operator, failing to notice a 45º rotation of the symmetrical cross shape, and producing 15 when presented with $3+5$. Being frustrated with my elaborate jargon and complex sentence construction might incline a reader to skim; if the reader's intended task is to edit, s/he might expect more errors where errors are to be found, and in skimming, miss the extra word in a the sentence that constitutes an error. After frequent experiences of assimilation produce automated habits, one can hardly be blamed; the tendency is innate, adaptive, and somewhat invariant in terms of simple prevalence. I.e., most normal people do it, and variation mostly exists in relative frequencies $\>0$.

Excluding abnormal individuals might make the phenomenon more invariant. Abnormal function like in the cognitive tendencies of people with obsessive compulsive personality disorder might present stronger exceptions to the rule that "everybody makes dumb mistakes sometimes," even somewhat often. But then again OCPD might not be such an exception, as its theoretical representations don't entirely match its real manifestations. (Same for its fictional representations; see my answer to Why is Mr. Monk unsure?)

I'm sure plenty of research can be found on how to encourage adaptive accommodation to prevent errors. I'm inclined to look toward motivation- and personality-based approaches, as those are my specialties – hence you might say they inform my own schemas and heuristics, encouraging me to assimilate your problem as just another of the kind I'm familiar with. If I fail to respond appropriately to any subtleties in your question as a result, consider it a demonstration! I admit I've spent most of my time so far on just reformulating and recapitulating the issue you describe.

Moving briefly into some modification strategies then, consider motivating attention. This can be achieved by increasing the sense of challenge to optimal levels that induce flow, which is a state of very intense, self-motivated, even blissful focus. Just produce the challenge by requiring higher accuracy, not faster task completion.

On somewhat less modifiable notes pertaining to individual differences in error frequencies, conscientiousness and cognitive complexity seem like relevant traits. Conscientiousness relates to attention to detail and concern for error prevention. Cognitive complexity relates to adaptive thought and tolerance for complex or multitudinous schemas, which would discourage over-application of too-simple schemas for every problem encountered.
> 4 votes

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Tags: attention
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# Question
Title: Can a strong lack of empathy be considered a disorder?
Premise from Wikipedia:

> More recently, popular science writer and Psychologist Daniel Goleman has drawn on social neuroscience research to propose that social intelligence is made up of social awareness (including empathy, attunement, empathic accuracy, and social cognition) and social facility (including synchrony, self-presentation, influence, and concern).

The thesis behind the book is that the neurological structure of human being suggest the importance of the empathy. He also states that scientific researches shows three types of individual lacking of empathy: narcissistic, Machiavellian, and psychopathic.

**The hypothesis of Goleman accomunating these 3 kind of people to the lack of empathy are shared by the cognitive sciences?**

# Answer
Yes he is at least somewhat correct and the terms he uses are commonly called the Dark triad. Now whether he is correctly diagnosing the ASPD and NPD is a question to which I am unable to delve further into because I have not read the books but strongly lacking empathy is characteristics of actual diseases. So I will give you a resemblance of the correct diagnosis criteria for those terms from an old DSM.

> The dark triad is a group of three personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. The use of the term "dark" reflects the perception that these traits have interpersonally aversive qualities
>
> Narcissism is characterized by grandiosity, pride, egotism, and a lack of empathy.
>
> Machiavellianism is characterized by manipulation and exploitation of others, a cynical disregard for morality, and a focus on self-interest and deception. Psychopathy is characterized by enduring antisocial behavior, impulsivity, selfishness, callousness, and remorselessness.
>
> The dark triad may refer to these traits at only a subclinical level. All three traits have been associated with a callous-manipulative interpersonal style. Jakobwitz and Egan carried out a factor analysis and found agreeableness strongly dissociated with these traits, and other factors, such as neuroticism and a lack of conscientiousness, associated with some traits. However, it has been suggested that agreeableness is not relevant to the core of the dark triad, and that instead the common variance is accounted for by callousness and manipulation. In other words, once callousness and manipulation are accounted for, the dark triad characteristics are unrelated to each other.

-wikipedia dark triad

**Narcissistic** is listed in the DSM as a clinical illness recognized by all psychologist and psychiatrist.

> Diagnostic criteria for 301.81 Narcissistic Personality Disorder These criteria are obsolete.
>
> DSM IV - TR
>
> (cautionary statement)
>
> A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:
>
> (1) has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)
>
> (2) is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
>
> (3) believes that he or she is "special" and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)
>
> (4) requires excessive admiration
>
> (5) has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations
>
> (6) is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends
>
> (7) lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others
>
> (8) is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her
>
> (9) shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes
>
> Reprinted with permission from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision. Copyright 2000 American Psychiatric Association

-Diagnostic criteria for 301.81 Narcissistic Personality Disorder

**Machiavellian** and **psychopathic** disorders are part of what is commonly called by psychologist Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASP) . ASP is in the DSM.

> DSM-IV-TR
>
> The APA's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition (DSM-IV-TR), defines antisocial personality disorder (in Axis II Cluster B):
>
> A) There is a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others occurring since age 15 years, as indicated by three or more of the following: failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest; deception, as indicated by repeatedly lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure; impulsivity or failure to plan ahead; irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults; reckless disregard for safety of self or others; consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations; lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another;
>
> B) The individual is at least age 18 years.
>
> C) There is evidence of conduct disorder with onset before age 15 years.
>
> D) The occurrence of antisocial behavior is not exclusively during the course of schizophrenia or a manic episode.
>
> ASPD falls under the dramatic/erratic cluster of personality disorders. In the DSM-5, the diagnosis antisocial personality disorder is kept, but it is no longer on another axis as the other mental disorders.

-wikipedia ASPD
> 3 votes

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Tags: social-psychology
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# Question
Title: What are the DSM requirements for 'Paranoid Personality Disorder'?
What are the requirements for **Paranoid Personality Disorder** as specified by the current revision of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual?

# Answer
Your asking for a very small citation from the DSM 5. I believe it falls under fair use. I'd be glad to add this to the internet for scholarship and research with another citations about Cluster A because it makes no changes to the value of DSM-5.

> Paranoid Personality Disorder
>
> Diagnostic Criteria 301.0 (F60.0)
>
> A. A pervasive distrust and suspiciousness of others such that their motives are interpreted as malevolent, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of con texts, as indicated by four (or more) of the following:
>
> 1. Suspects, without sufficient basis, that others are exploiting, harming, or deceiving him or her.
> 2. Is preoccupied with unjustified doubts about the loyalty or trustworthiness of friends or associates.
> 3. Is reluctant to confide in others because of unwarranted fear that the information will be used maliciously against him or her.
> 4. Reads hidden demeaning or threatening meanings into benign remarks or events.
> 5. Persistently bears grudges (i.e., is unforgiving of insults, injuries, or slights).
> 6. Perceives attacks on his or her character or reputation that are not apparent to others and is quick to react angrily or to counterattack.
> 7. Has recurrent suspicions, without justification, regarding fidelity of spouse or sexual partner.
>
> B. Does not occur exclusively during the course of schizophrenia, a bipolar disorder or depressive disorder with psychotic features, or another psychotic disorder and is not attributable to the physiological effects of another medical condition.
>
> Note: If criteria are met prior to the onset of schizophrenia, add “premorbid,” i.e., “paranoid personality disorder (premorbid).”

-DSM-5

A general explanation of DSM Cluster A is as follows:

> Cluster A: Paranoid, Schizoid, and Schizotypal Personality Disorders
>
> Cluster A is called the odd, eccentric cluster. It includes Paranoid Personality Disorder, Schizoid Personality Disorder, and Schizotypal Personality Disorders. The common features of the personality disorders in this cluster are social awkwardness and social withdrawal. These disorders are dominated by distorted thinking.
>
> The Paranoid Personality Disorder\* is characterized by a pervasive distrust and suspiciousness of other people. People with this disorder assume that others are out to harm them, take advantage of them, or humiliate them in some way. They put a lot of effort into protecting themselves and keeping their distance from others. They are known to preemptively attack others whom they feel threatened by. They tend to hold grudges, are litigious, and display pathological jealously. Distorted thinking is evident. Their perception of the environment includes reading malevolent intentions into genuinely harmless, innocuous comments or behavior, and dwelling on past slights. For these reasons, they do not confide in others and do not allow themselves to develop close relationships. Their emotional life tends to be dominated by distrust and hostility.

-DSM-5: The Ten Personality Disorders: Cluster A
> 3 votes

# Answer
Sadly, the DSM 5 is under a very strict copyright.

However, there is a list of PPD requirements in the ICD-10 that is publicly available online:

That section of the manual describes Paranoid Personality Disorder as follows:

> **F60.0 Paranoid personality disorder**
>
> Personality disorder characterized by excessive sensitivity to setbacks, unforgiveness of insults; suspiciousness and a tendency to distort experience by misconstruing the neutral or friendly actions of others as hostile or contemptuous; recurrent suspicions, without justification, regarding the sexual fidelity of the spouse or sexual partner; and a combative and tenacious sense of personal rights. There may be excessive self-importance, and there is often excessive self-reference.
> 3 votes

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Tags: abnormal-psychology, reference-request
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