# Question
Title: Are mnemonics by creating associations good for memory?
I read a book which says that to remember the lists of arbitrary objects, we should take a well-known ordered list (so that you know what is on the first place, what is on the second) and associate the items of this familiar list with your target list items. This is especially important for abstract objects because our brain can memorize only visual pictures (you can visualize familiar things). For instance, instead of directly memorizing the 10 abstract **amendements** to (US) constitution, (1.Freedom of Speech, 2.Right to Bear Arms, 3.Protection From Quartering Troops, 4.Freedom from Unreasonable Search and Seizure, and etc), you translate them into a list of visualizable **amendment images**, (1. Speaker, 2. Gun, 3. Soldier, 4. Spotlight, 5. A picture of you, 6. Judge riding a fast motorcycle, 7. Jury, 8. Excessive amount of money, 9. Making a right turn with your hand over your mouth, 10. State Capitol building). Then, you come up with another, well-known list of visualizable **loci objects**, e.g. (head top, nose, mouth, ribs, liver, joint, cap, fibula, ball, sand),

Finally, you invent **10 stories**, to map the loci items to the amendment images. In overall, ordered loci list serves as a list of keys that we can iterate and, by means of vivid stories, map to the target abstract items.

Yet, I see that you memorize 4 lists (original list, keys and images and stories) in place of single amendment list alone. This is 4x more information. It would be ok if the associations were natural and teach me the world around me. However, they must be absolutely bizzare because they do not exist, unnatural and, secondly, the outlandish pictures are much better memorizable (they call this thinking out-of-the-box)

Also, inventing the stories is too creative task for me. I feel like I waste too much mental energy to create garbage, the stupid associations in my head. Is it right? Won't this mnemotechnique create a mess in my head?

**ps**

Idriz Zogaj, Daniel Kilov and Joshua Foer are memory athletes that popularize the approach in TED conference.

# Answer
Just a few words on mnemonics before answering your question. I have been practicing for two years. First because I was impressed how easy it was to remember items using these techniques. My personal best time for learning the order of 52 cards is 1min 40s, which is not really good compared to real competitors, but the point is that practicing 30min a day during 3 months can be enough to get this kind of performances. Of course to do that you have to **learn a code that binds numbers or cards to predefined images**. I can't be more specific because I would risk to be off topic.

However don't expect too much from these techniques concerning **real world knowledge**. With training you can learn fast as hell a list of words, but learning more semantic knowledge is - I think - more challenging. If you find good images, It can provides you a perfect recall, but you would need **spaced repetition** to ensure it on the long term. If you don't repeat, you take the risk to loose everything you learned, more than with classic methods I think. Unfortunately, I don't have many sources apart from my experience and experiences of friends to back up this claim. However, I found a study by Wang et al. (1992) cited in part 7 of an interesting review on learning techniques by Dunlosky et al. (2013) which found this effect on the use of mental imagery on vocabulary learning. There is no absolute proof that mnemonic techniques can work for everything, but (1) it's interesting to see how it works (2) it is funny, especially memory palace building (3) if you spend enough time to learn a code, you can learn phone numbers, credit cards, poker odds and things like that very easily.

Concerning your practical questions, a good approach would be to check how the community proceeds to use mnemonic strategies. Have a look on the Mnemotechnics Forum on ArtOfMemory.com for example or their wiki. I think you would get more reliable advices than in books. For example the peg technique you mention (i.e. loci object in your words) is clearly less popular than the **use of real place as locis**. It has two main advantages :

* It provides a good organization (your list order follows the spatial order of your locis). Then to remember your list, you just have to do a mental travel.
* It is easier to store an image in a place, no need to find specific association, just picture your mental object like if it were really in your loci and let the magic happen.

Then, to answer your question, you really just need to memorize **1 thing** : the images. Loci are just a powerful way to retrieve these images, like a storing device. Images are chosen to be firmly tied up with the item you want to learn so you don't have to spend time to learn the association you made. Images don't have to be '**absolutely bizzare**', it makes things more memorable but it's not an absolute condition. Trying to prove this, a study found no effect for learning a list of words, but I don't have the reference now. Same remarks for the stories. It makes things more memorable, and can provide you some links between the images, but again it's not an absolute condition. Moreover, **stories** can be very short, like a simple action or context linking the image 1 and the image 2.

You should not waste time and energy on creating associations. On the opposite, you should relax and let them come to your mind, and take the first things popping up. This kind of creativity is not a sort of adult-creativity for which time and work is needed, but rather a sort of child-creativity for which you just have to let your imagination take the control of your thoughts. It should not be a painful task, on the contrary, **you should get some fun**.

<sub> Wang, A. Y., Thomas, M. H., & Ouellette, J. A. (1992). Keyword mnemonic and retention of second-language vocabulary words. Journal of Educational Psychology, 84(4), 520.
Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4-58. </sub>
> 4 votes

# Answer
The thing about memory, is it requires Long Term Potentiation (LTP) to be effective. The synapses are not reliable like some other tissues of the body; for instance cardiac muscle, where the junctions between muscle cells are designed to fire without fail, the brain is reliant upon being primed with attention and repetition to create reliable synaptic communication.

This poses the first dilemma of memorising and storing such an excessive number of unrelated lists. Essentially they are only related because you are stating that they are related. The initial list is unrelated and the lists themselves are not related from one to the other. Given that attention is required to prime the brain for LTP, the more disjointed the list the more difficult it is to remember, as it is *literally* uninteresting. It is a chore to recall unrelated lists. It is easier to remember things that are *fun*, *stimulating*, that we find *interesting*. This is one of the problems with rote learning.

So the memory system is limited. So is the ability to access this system. Study on working memory, notably Miller's Law all show that the brain is limited, whether it is by a magic number 7 +- 2, the human memory is fallible.

Marrying these two concepts, I would conclude that the fewer steps made between recalling a list of eclectic items and the *interesting* mnemonic created to recall this the better.

The idea of a mnemonic is to reduce the size of what is being recalled (hence to take the load off working memory) and to make the list make sense, hence increase the likelihood of placing the list into the long term memory.

Within this you are also mixing the difficulty of semantic memory with the use of mnemonics and visualisation as a process of assisting memory. The idea of each is that they are encapsulated processes to assist with memory merging them does not necessarily improve the efficacy.

Here is an example, it can be replaced with any form of sentences.

The concept you have presented is too complicated for me to spend the time mocking up a draft from this to demonstrate why it is too complex (which speaks volumes), suffice to say, choose the above, or create a long winded path to try to remember.

*Disclaimer: this is my idea, based on some things I know about the brain.*
> 3 votes

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Tags: memory, long-term-memory, working-memory, mnemonic, semantic-memory
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# Question
Title: What is the optimal combination of text and background color for EEG experiments?
Most studies that I know of use yellow text on blue background (though with different hues).

This choice is mostly motivated by tradition ("We always did it like that. Never touch a running system"). But is this combination really the best one?

I have found a number of studies about color combinations and readability. Some suggest that black text on white background is the best, others say white on blue, etc.

I imagine that there are specific requirements for EEG studies as they are regularly run in dim lit rooms. So a completely bright white screen maybe not the best idea, I think.

It surely does make a difference if the task is dependent on, e.g., quick word recognition or reading a short story.

And what about flat screens vs. CRT screens? Are there different optimal color combinations for these screen types?

Is there any general optimal combination?

# Answer
> 1 votes
Are you trying to measure something specific to the stimulus you are presenting or is it just a matter of displaying text on a screen where what you are measuring is unrelated to the text per se?

For instance, experiments I run depend on the stimulus presentation. We are targeting a certain visual pathway, so for example one stimulus is red/green and high contrast, the other black/white and low contrast, both on a black background. We have also run on a grey background as that can be easier for the eyes. And we also have dim lit rooms, to help amplify the signal or even lights off. Also, the stimuli are flickering at a high rate so we use a LCD monitor with a refresh rate of 120hz. We used to use CRT monitors though as the black color is blacker there then newer monitors.

It just depends on why you need to optimize it. Is it for a true signal you are recording? Or simply comfort and ease for the participant?

If it is simply for comfort, I would recommend no color, but grey background and black letters, and dimmed lights. If the contrast is too high, such as black background and white letters, this could be a strain to read over time. There is no gold standard. It's according to what your needs are.

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Tags: perception, experimental-psychology, eeg, color
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# Question
Title: How to apply different motivational theories to understand career orientation?
"What motivates you towards choosing the career/job orientation you have chosen? Discuss and explain with reference to three of the motivational theories discussed during the course".

I'm used to writing more scientific essays in the field of psychology, but I am finding some difficulty introducing and maintaining this assignment with a more subjective approach. We are expected to keep with APA rules and formatting and stick to a scientific method of writing. Yet if I am to write a theoretical paper, how am I to keep the focus on what motivates me personally?

# Answer
Assuming the specific case of being "motivated towards a career" rather then simply getting a job to make ends meet, there can be several factors.

Social status is probably the most common pursuit of a career.

Enjoyment, which is the ideal reason for pursuing a career. Usually a career sought for enjoyment is referred to as 'pursuing one's dream'.

Proximity (a.k.a. convenience) is another driving factor. Which could also be considered the "path of least resistance". An example of this is following in your parents' footsteps. Another example could be someone's part-time job turning into a full-time career.

**Addition**

I found these two article which describes the work of John Holland and his theory of career choice. (not the scientific essay as requested in the comments but perhaps with more time I, or someone else, could elaborate on this topic further. It is definitely a good one)

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mr-personality/201106/the-psychology-career-choices-why-personality-matters

http://www.careerkey.org/choose-a-career/hollands-theory-of-career-choice.html#.U04FZfldXh5
> 3 votes

# Answer
Much of the scientific literature in psychology is concerned with proposing and empirically testing theories. However, if you are a practitioner you are interested in how you can apply these ideas to achieve applied goals. This requires that you understand the support for various scientific ideas and that you are able to apply them to a specific situation.

Take for example the Job Characteristics Model. This model suggests that five core job characteristics (i.e., skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback) tend to increase motivation (among other outcomes and mediating processes).

Thus, you could apply such a theory to make decisions about career choices. For example, all else being equal you might evaluate career choices by the degree to which they allow for autonomy, use of meaningful skill, and so on. Or you could use the ideas to think about how you could modify your position to make it more motivating.

Or take another example, of Holland's Codes which provides a scheme for understanding individual differences in vocational preference. You could use this to think about what particular jobs you might find more motivating.

And of course there are many theories directly concerned with understanding motivational processes.
> 3 votes

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Tags: social-psychology, motivation, io-psychology
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title: Why is working memory so small?

text:
# Question
Title: Why is working memory so small?
I know that the concept of working memory may be subject to discussion. Still, there is a storage capacity limit. This is a real mystery to me. Working memory is known to be positively correlated to various tests (IQ for example). Why did natural selection not grant us a better storage capacity?

Before asking this question, I read some hypotheses by Cowan: The Magical Mystery Four: How is Working Memory Capacity Limited, and Why? Two camps are presented: capacity-limit-as-weakness and capacity-limit-as-strength. Basically the first camp explains this weakness from a neuronal point of view, claiming that keeping many items active is greedy and can cause interference. The second camp pretends that the lesser the number of items accessible is the quicker the cognitive processes are (chunking, searching, etc.). Honestly I don't know what to think. More than that, I don't feel its very convincing. If our neural system has evolved toward some incredibly powerful processing modules and can't even keep 10 items active at the same time, there must be a reason. I am more inclined to think that the capacity limit is a kind of strength somewhere, but I don't feel very convinced by the examples provided in the short passage I mentioned.

**Do you have any extra arguments for/against any of these theoretical positions?**
My preconception is that this limit constrains us to encode the real in the most powerful fashion. In short, we are always forced to learn more complex patterns. Is it relevant or not? Do you have any source which could challenge or back up this view?

# Answer
There's a huge amount of perspectives you could take in answering a question like this, but I would like to approach it from the perspective of dual process theories (see the Evans, 2008 Annual Review paper for an outline). I'm not going to reference this answer much beyond that, because almost all the information is adapted from this review, with some explanation.

There's any number of specific dual process theories, but they all state that cognition is divided between type 1 processes, which are fast, parallel, automatic, implicit, and generally don't vary between people, and type 2 processes, which are slow, serial, controlled, explicit, and crucially, **rely on working memory**.

The evolutionary side to this is type 1 processes are the specialized, domain specific evolved functions of our brain to deal with specific problems, like predicting the destination of moving objects, recognising faces, or figuring out how similar lions are to tigers. Type 2 processes (i.e. working memory), on the other hand, are domain general, in that they can be flexibly applied to any domain, rather than just the task they evolved to solve, but *this flexibility comes at cost of limited capacity, increased mental effort, and so slower processing*.

This limitation is referred to in the dual process literature as 'the singularity principle' (Evans, 2006) - system one, by processing in parallel, can deal with an incredible amount of information at the same time (and needs to, because it takes care of the basic functions that keep us alive from day to day), while the slower type 2 processes can only actively process one piece of information at a time (but can keep "7 plus or minus 2" "chunks" of information in mind if they don't have to be manipulated; Miller, 1956).

...By analogy, think of the difference between the old-fashioned telephone in your house, which was designed for only one function, and so performs it perfectly, with minimal resources, and a smartphone, which can theoretically perform any computational or communicative function, but occasionally disconnects your calls for no apparent reason.

## Some References

Evans, J. S. B. (2008). Dual-processing accounts of reasoning, judgment, and social cognition. Annu. Rev. Psychol., 59, 255-278.

Evans, J. S. B. (2008). Dual-processing accounts of reasoning, judgment, and social cognition. Annu. Rev. Psychol., 59, 255-278.

Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological review, 63(2), 81.
> 5 votes

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Tags: cognitive-modeling, working-memory
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title: Training for the corpus callosum?

text:
# Question
Title: Training for the corpus callosum?
Since reading is done in the left hemisphere of the brain, does reading text in the left visual field train the corpus callosum? For instance, I am interested in knowing whether training may lead to an increased size of the corpus callosum (e.g. more fibers), and whether this translates into some cognitive benefit (e.g. faster response times or comprehension of text in the left visual field).

I think so because I recently saw a document where it was reported that a guy who had his corpus callosum damaged by a bolt couldn't read words on the left anymore. The reason for that is/was that words in the left visual field go to the right hemisphere of the brain. To be read the information is then transported via the corpus callosum to the left hemisphere.

# Answer
> 11 votes
It's been known that Increased Corpus Callosum size was found in musicians who began music training before age 7 and that Training working memory leads to growth in Corpus Callosum. As for how to train working memory, that's a diverse subject. There have been a lot of experiments involving Training working memory for ADHD patients, however a meta-analysis has revealed that most of the training from these ADHD-centered programs only leads to short-term gains, not long-term or generalisable gains.

To speculate some, I think taking on new tasks and challenging yourself repeatedly in a wide context (as opposed to isolated tasks "designed" for working memory) is your best bet. Learn a new instrument, learn to program in a new language, learn new regions (spatial mapping is associated at least with hippocampal cell growth as long as you use spatial strategies, not procedural ones).

# Answer
> 2 votes
I don't know if it's possible to train the corpus callosum, but aside from that, I don't think you can read text in the left visual field for longer than a fraction of a second.

To be able to read or see something in your left visual field, your eyes must be focused on something to the right of that (Imagine a fixation cross in the middle of a PC screen where your eyes are focused on and a word appearing to the left of that). First of all, you will have the reflex doing a saccade towards that word, so your eyes will be focused on that word and the word will be in both visual half fields.

Even if you can suppress that reflex, the word will not be projected onto the fovea, so the vision will not be sharp. The word will be blurry if it hasn't a huge font. If it has a huge font, there's a possibility that part of the word will be in the right visual field as well, because it is so big.

I think reading one word this way is rather difficult, I cannot imagine reading a whole text this way. Certainly because a whole text exists of multiple lines, which will be blurry and perhaps difficult to distinguish. A whole text is also wider than one word, which would be or presented partially in both visual half fields again, or even more to the left, where the vision would be even blurrier.

If you assume that you can read a text this way, I don't think it is possible to have *more* fibers, but it might be possible that you will have *thicker* fibers, or at least stronger connections between hemispheres, which could result in a shorter interhemispheric transmission time. The brain is pretty plastic. Who knows.

Please note that all of this isn't scientific, but more or less my opinion.

# Answer
> 1 votes
From split brain studies I find it might be possible that the right and left hemisphere differences are caused from reading top down left to right. So perhaps learning a written language that reads right to left would prove beneficial. But from what I found walking also increases the corpus callosum. But walking is found to benefit the brain density in general. Also Einstein did have an enlarged corpus callosum and did take violin lessons when he was young, which reconfirms the idea previously mentioned. I think perhaps the sports tennis ping pong and golf might help as well. Along with compassion meditation. My reason for this is because they have the fastest brain waves of any other activities excluding drugs, but needs to take 15 years to build up from practice. People who lived very long have also played tennis, although it is just one person who comes to mind, it might still be pertinent. The longest lived American woman.

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Tags: reading, neuroanatomy, brain-training, lateralization
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# Question
Title: Can anxiety cause a heart attack, black-out or insanity?
David Burns in his self-help book about overcoming depression, anxiety and interpersonal problems called *The Feeling Good Handbook*¹ states:

> ...neurotic anxiety results from distorted thoughts that have little to no basis in reality. If you are having a panic attack, you may believe that something terrible will happen if you let your anxiety get out of hand. You might think you'll pass out from a stroke or have a heart attack or go crazy. Although these fears seem legitimate, they're quite unrealistic because: (1) Anxiety *never* causes strokes or heart attacks. (2) Most people who are afraid of passing out during a panic attack have never once passed out when in a state of panic. In fact, you *cannot* pass out during a panic attack because your heart is beating rapidly and pumping extra blood to the brain. (3) Panic attacks never lead to insanity or loss of control. You are worrying about something that's blatantly unrealistic.

This is a revelation to me. Is it true that it is impossible for a panic attack to cause heart attacks? black-outs? insanity? If there are exceptions, how are they explained? Does this extend to all forms of anxiety, fears and phobias, not only panic attacks?

¹ Part III “Feeling confident: how to conquer anxiety, fears, and phobias”, Chapter 11: “Understanding anxiety”, page 212.

# Answer
Recently we had and interesting symposium on stres, anxiety and psychoimunology. Guest were psychologists from UCLA stresslab In this website: http://www.uclastresslab.org/ you can find a bunch of researches which conect various human mental conditions (including anxiety) with interkulin 6 and cortisol. Those two supstances are conected to hearth attack and other diseases. I hope this helps.
> 1 votes

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Tags: physiology, anxiety, fear
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# Question
Title: How many items do I need to design a measure?
I have to design my own psychometric test to measure a construct. I have a construct, but part of the requirement is to include a rationale for the number of items in the instrument, which I don't know how to justify. Also, using a Likert scale, I have to justify why I am using a 5-point Likert scale. It would be great to have some literature to refer to.

# Answer
> 2 votes
Cross Validated has plenty of info on this topic; arguably it's a duplicate of some question over there. Check out "Under what conditions should Likert scales be used as ordinal or interval data?" and my synopsis of Bollen and Barb (1981) in this answer. If you have more to say about why this is a question specific to Cognitive Sciences (beyond the presumable involvement of subjective judgments and self-reporting on attitudes), you should say it; I might be able to add unique substance to this answer. (BTW, there is plenty of literature out there on this question. Frankly, I'd guess you haven't tried very hard in looking for yourself. If you have, you could also improve answers by noting what you know so far.)

As for non-unique substance that mostly approaches the problem from a statistical perspective, consider what you'll probably want to do once you have the data. If your theory of your latent construct is typical, you probably want to estimate individuals' scores on a continuous dimension, not just rank people. I.e., you probably want to be able to say how different one person is from another, not just who ranks higher and how many people are between them.

The basic problem with Likert scales is that they don't really allow you to do this inherently. E.g., the difference between ratings `3` and `4` isn't necessarily the same as the difference between `2` and `3` even if you use exactly opposite anchors like `2`/`4`$=$`dis`/`agree` and `3` is given a completely neutral anchor. Therefore you can't really assume the sum of a few items has this property (interval-level measurement, basically) if you just treat these ratings as numbers.

Another halfway decent place to start reading is Wikipedia's classical test theory (CTT) page. This might not be the gentlest introduction to the underlying issues, but it's probably nicer than sending you straight to IRT. IMO, that's where one ultimately has to go to understand latent dimension estimation in terms of thresholds between Likert scale points...but if you can satisfy CTT assumptions, you can avoid a lot of complexity, which I assume you want to do, for better or worse.

Bollen and Barb (1981) demonstrate that Likert scales with $\ge5$ rating options can be treated like interval measures without weakening correlations too terribly much, but more is diminishingly better. Fewer simplifies the rating task somewhat in general, but can sometimes make it harder for respondents with nuanced opinions that can't be reflected accurately with fewer options...and either way, it costs you info. Conversely, having tons of options might start to elicit arbitrary noise rather than meaningfully distinct responses...so consider whether additional options actually mean something different from existing ones. If they do, you're probably not going to do any harm by adding them.

Another technical issue for which I have no better reference than my former advisor (he never told me where he read it): more scale options tends to increase the size of the general factor (in a factor-analytic sense). I suspect this has something to do with response biases like acquiescence bias and extreme response style. If you know what you're doing, you can control for "nuisance factors" like these, but it's advanced stats. See "Factor analysis of questionnaires composed of Likert items" for more.

As for the number of items, it depends somewhat on similar concerns: your abilities to approximate and estimate a continuous dimension, and your ability to differentiate items meaningfully. A minimum of three items are necessary for statistically meaningful estimation of latent factor scores (this may be true of latent score $(\theta)$ estimation using IRT as well; I'm not sure, but I think it should be). Two doesn't permit identification of a unique solution in factor analysis – there's no indication of how to weigh your two items as measures of any common factor(s). If you're trying to measure more than one latent construct (or trying to separate out nuisance factors from your construct of interest), you'll need at least one item for each that only really measures that construct, and three that measure each. That's only four items for two correlated constructs, but six for two unrelated constructs.

Again, more items is generally better for the sake of approximating and estimating a continuous latent dimension...but if you're just going to sum or average Likert ratings, you're implicitly assuming that all items measure the latent construct equally well, or that their inequalities at least balance out overall. Therefore you don't want to just add more items if they're going to be substantially worse, unless you're willing to do some nontrivial statistical work to sort them out properly.

I'd also hesitate to add overly duplicative items, because that could encourage inattentive responding and thus engender both arbitrary noise and (more) systematic bias. Using semantic opposites might be defensible: e.g., 1) Tumblers are better than pumpers; 2) Pumpers are better than tumblers...? This can help manage acquiescence bias if it's done properly, but it can also irk respondents and introduce nuisance multidimensionality.

Multidimensionality is yet another problem that can arise with too many items...but again, it's not necessarily a problem if you know what you're doing statistically. There are ways of separating factors of interest from others that might influence responses if you have enough items. If you or someone else might actually figure out how to do this someday (it's not THAT hard), it's better to have the items from the outset than to have to add or change them later, because you probably want to maintain a consistent stimulus across all data you collect over the long-term life of the measure.

However, if it's important to keep it simple for the sake of avoiding complex calculation or for the sake of reducing respondent fatigue (yet another source of inattentive responding, noise, and bias), you might want to limit yourself to 10–20 short, clearly-phrased, single-idea items. Some questionnaires have 100–500 items, but that requires some serious compensation for a participant's time and concentration; people do not like to think that hard for that long. Consider the concerns of your target population and any distracting elements in your response collection scenario, and try piloting your first draft of the test with a few people to see how it comes across and whether it takes as long to complete as you think it should. Several stages of revision aren't uncommon when this is done properly, but improper practice isn't uncommon either, nor is it much easier to fail completely than it is to pull it off perfectly.

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Tags: measurement, test
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# Question
Title: How to analyze reaction times and accuracy together?
Is there a good way to analyze reaction times and accuracy together, other than MANOVA?

I have data from an experiment in which participants had to respond to stimuli in two different conditions in a within-subject design. And my impression is that some subjects differ in accuracy between those two conditions, while some others differ in reaction time. **How can I test such a hypothesis?**

# Answer
> 13 votes
A paper comparing the performance of Inverse Efficiency Scores and diffusion models for the quantification of RT and accuracy can be found here.

Rach et al. (2011) "On quantifying multisensory interaction effects in reaction time and detection rate " Psychological Research Volume 75, Number 2, 77-94, DOI, PDF

# Answer
> 15 votes
MANOVA is definitely a bad idea given that one dv is continuous and the other is binomial. After exploring a number of different approaches to combining RT and accuracy data, I've come to conclude that the best current approach is to use linear ballistic accumulator model (e.g., see Donkin et al 2011).

The LBA is a simple (structurally and computationally) framework that lets you speak to the different processes (info processing efficiency vs response criterion) that jointly contribute to RT and error data.

### References

* Donkin, C., Brown, S. & Heathcote, A. (2011). Drawing conclusions from choice response time models: A tutorial using the linear ballistic accumulator. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 55, 140-151. PDF

# Answer
> 10 votes
There are a variety of models solving accuracy and RT that have been pretty well tested and LBA is probably fine (I haven't used it). If you don't want to go that far there is a rather simple way to analyze data controlling for SAT that has much better mathematical properties than IE scores (which, as Mike said were named by me, but offhandedly proposed by Townsend & Asby, easily conceptualized as related to older rate of information scores holding information constant, and probably popularized most by Shore).

The first problem with the IE transformation (rt in ms ÷ proportion correct) is that it assumes a linear relationship between RT and acc. That's clearly not the case. While one can often achieve a linear relationship between a predictor and RT, the relationship between a predictor and accuracy is invariably an ogive. One can make it much more linear by transforming accuracy to logit or log-odds scores (keep in mind accuracy, and in most cases even RT, are COMPLETELY arbitrary representations of what they measure). Furthermore, rt has much better statistical properties represented as responses/second than seconds/response. So, taking 1/rt in seconds would make that data more normal. Therefore, logit / inverse RT scores might be a better transform. But it's still a transform into some unknown score... I think we could call it Linearized Inverse Efficiency (or L.I.E) :)... OK, it's not actually inverse efficiency anymore since it's not an inverse rate but an accuracy corrected rate.. how about A.C.E, accuracy corrected efficiency?)

But... if you're going to go that far, why not just model the logistic regression on RT in each condition? You could then hold the RT constant for each condition (maybe the grand mean) and look at the changes in predicted accuracy across conditions. That would be a reasonable way to combine the two.

The only issue I've run into with that last one is that it's all about the leading edge of your RT distribution. You need to hack off everything after accuracy asymptotes. If what you intended to measure is the immediate response to a stimulus then that's perfectly fine. If you want to capture something about the tails of the distributions it might not be well represented, but you could look at that separately. You could keep that later data by just making the logistic regression quadratic. On the flip side, one advantage you get is that you actually make use of all of the early low accuracy RTs.

This method does require those low accuracy RTs so you do, in general, have to encourage speed in the experiment. That should also be done with any transform or model of RT and accuracy because you have to have some accuracy variance to work with.

(one thing I haven't tried, which would probably work, is just entering RT into a multilevel logistic regression of accuracy. If you include it as an interaction term you can then examine the predicted scores holding it constant.)

# Answer
> 7 votes
Another possible approach is using EZ-diffusion model suggested by Wagenmaker, van der Mass and Grasman (2007). Quoting Brown & Heathcote (2008; p. 4):

> This model is extremely simple, with just one source of variability in evidence accumulation—within-trial randomness—and simple linear accumulation (although evidence for one response does count against the other). The EZ-diffusion model is even simpler than the LBA, but it is incomplete. Wagen- makers et al. proposed the EZ-diffusion as a descriptive rather than process model, with the aim of adequately describing data as simply as possible. The tradeoff in developing such a simple model was that it could not account for some of the empirical phenomena in choice RT, such as the relative speed of correct vs. incorrect responses.

# Answer
> 6 votes
I recently had similar problem and I used inverse efficiency (IE) scores. These scores were derived by dividing the response times by correct response rates separately for each condition, carried out in such a way that the higher the score was, the worse was the performance. So you get something like "corrected reaction time" scores. Here is example of paper that uses it - check Experiment 2 on page 144:

> Petrini, K., McAleer, P., & Pollick, F. E. (2010). Audiovisual integration of emotional signals from music improvisation does not depend on temporal correspondence. *Brain research*, *1323*, 139-148.

# Answer
> 4 votes
As mentioned in the other comments, ANOVA is problematic when mixing types of predictor variables. (Generalized) mixed effects models are gaining popularity these days and actually provide a very convenient way for modelling such things. A paper demonstrating the efficacy of this approach as well as giving a tutorial-like introduction is:

Davidson, D. J. und A. E. Martin (2013). Modeling accuracy as a function of response time with the generalized linear mixed effects model. Acta Psychologica, 144:83– 96.

There's also a related post on CrossValidated.

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Tags: methodology, experimental-psychology, statistics, reaction-time
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# Question
Title: Common components of other cognitive architectures and the Semantic Pointer Architecture
In the papers I've read about it, the Semantic Pointer Architecture (SPA) embodied in Spaun is said to be more biologically plausible than many other proposed architectures such as the Neural Blackboard Architecture, ACT-R and ICS. However, I was wondering if they had any shared attributes? If this is too broad of a question, which one can SPA considered most similar to?

I am currently reading "How to Build a Brain" by Chris Eliasmith to answer these questions and will post my own answer shortly, but I was hoping for other perspectives.

# Answer
> 2 votes
In "How to Build a Brain", Chris Eliasmith draws parrallels between Spaun and various architectures. All of my quotes in my answer are from that book.

The **Dynamic Field Theory of Cognition** is similarly pre-occupied with outside stimulation as being essential to understanding cognitive function, consequently "there is little in the SPA that could not be reformulated using terms more familiar to dynamic systems theorists"

**Leabra** shares an emphasis on implementation on a realistic biological substrate. In particular, the cortex-\>basal ganglia-\>thalamus loop for action control/decision, as well as the effects of dopamine on Spaun, were heavily influenced by Leabra.

**ACT-R** also shares the cortex-\>basal ganglia-\>thalamus loop, but more importantly puts a similar emphasis on timing. That is, there is a specific time for switching between tasks and reacting to stimuli that must be followed.

**ICS** shares the similar mathematical binding operation as SPA, thus many of the results of the ICS are informative for SPA and "how such representations can be related to a wide variety of linguistic processing".

While these similarities give a good reference frame of where Spaun stands in the realm of neural architectures, it is much more interesting (and important!) to note where it deviates. A topic which is obviously covered in great detail in "How to Build a Brain".

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Tags: theoretical-neuroscience, computational-modeling
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title: Terminology for deep-seated feelings?

text:
# Question
Title: Terminology for deep-seated feelings?
I'm interested in human emotion. Particularly, we have many words for different emotions, such as love, hate, etc. The issue arises that I have not found words for some of the emotions I've heard my friends describe and which I too have felt. These feelings do not appear to be accessible to everybody, because I have spoken with numerous people and only two of them so far have not met me with a blank stare or tried to fit my description to commonly described emotions like 'love' or 'anger'. Generally, the emotions are much more complex than the behaviours those words entail

For example, one of these feelings is the sensation of something missing, the sensation that there's more to life, and which embodies itself as a sense of vague, omnipresent dissatisfaction. Both I and a friend of mine have had this sensation and when we are happy, it is still there. If we think about it, it easily sobers the sensation of happiness, but at the same time, it is 'deeper', for lack of a better term, than standard emotion because it does not exclude other emotions.

Another such emotion, which does not seem to have a name is one I have experienced. It is a strong sensation of attachment to a girl who I used to date. We broke up, but remained friends, and I weathered through the resentment to keep the friendship because she thinks in a similar way to me. The sensation is very strong and brings to mind the idea that, regardless of what happens, I want her to be happy, whether we date again, remain friends, or become strangers. It is not an urge or compulsion to action, and like the sense of dissatisfaction, is omnipresent. It is also not linked to her presence or absence. Perhaps empathy or respect is the best word for it.

I'm curious about the terminology for sensations that exist only in relation to a mental concept and nothing tangible. Largely, it seems that language is inadequate to convey feelings of this kind, but I'm intensely interested in the terminology that may exist for these sensations. There are more of them, and they generally correspond to simpler emotions and concepts, but they have a very distinct and complex nature when compared to both the sensations and behaviours associated with those simple emotions.

Are there words to communicate these feelings without grossly simplifying and misrepresenting them?

# Answer
> 2 votes
Angst seems to fit your first example about as well as I could imagine any one word fitting. Angst is somewhat complex and ambiguous because it's used in many contexts with different connotations. It's roughly a combination of smoldering frustration and creeping anxiety as I understand it. It's more of a latent restlessness than an overt, clear emotion – somewhat more trait-like than most emotions, which are generally more transient *states*. Its use in existentialism particularly suits the global feeling of incompleteness you describe. IMO, it's a more cognitive or conative term than most emotion words too, in that it is sometimes thought to arise from unresolved cognitive dissonance regarding one's identity and meaning in life. Emotions are more often automatic reactions to present circumstances, generally speaking.

As I understand this contrast, the usual emotions may occur on a somewhat different level of conscious experience. The ordinary emotional level fluctuates and cycles like the stimuli and routines that provoke them, somewhat like echoes of the stimuli. One may focus on them, or choose to let them pass, depending on the extent to which they hold one's attention, I suppose. The more cognitive side of experience is somewhat more stable. In some ways, people are built to resist changing their minds in response to every new stimulus. To be fair, most don't want to have a strong emotional reaction to every stimulus either, but the resistance is stronger with respect to beliefs and attitudes, or *schemata* in general. (I've described this resistance somewhat further in my answer to, 'Can attention be improved to reduce the frequency of mistakes?')

Schemata are more heavily involved in emotions about the self and life in general. Arguably, these emotions about subjects are attitudes, and thus subsumed partially within schemata as a broader class...but I haven't got a citation for that; it's just my understanding of how these concepts intertwine. (See also my answer to, 'Is there a precise definition of "attitude"?') IMO, it explains why feelings like angst, which often reflect discontented attitudes toward oneself or life at large, don't fluctuate as much and resist attempts to cheer up. The problems these attitudes indicate generally can't be resolved by just having a little fun or forgetting about them, as people often do to cope with simpler, more circumstantial, negative emotions. These problems tend to require attitude change to resolve, which surely is a deeper process. I see no problem with referring to this as "deeper" BTW; depth psychology and existential psychology both use this term extensively to differentiate higher-level (i.e., more complex or developmentally advanced) motivational content from the simpler stuff people are more used to discussing casually, atheoretically, or from folk psychological perspectives.

As for your second example, *companionate love* from Sternberg's triangular theory, or storge from John Lee's / Hendrick & Hendrick's theory of love styles would seem to fit equally and more or less synonymously. Again, it's more of an attitude about an enduring identity (hers, rather than yours, or that of life itself) than an emotional reaction to present, transient circumstances, so relative stability and independence from daily fluctuations in emotional states is to be expected. I would say empathy and respect are components of the emergent property of companionate love, especially the intermediate component of intimacy (one half of companionate love, according to Sternberg). Here's the diagram:

by Lnesa, I think...

Feel free to comment or edit if I've missed your point by addressing your examples too specifically or narrowly. If you have other feelings that need classifying, I'd be happy to see more questions like this.

# Answer
> 0 votes
I can only provide a vocabulary with which someone else may answer your second question.

If you would like to ground the emotion you feel towards your ex, you would do well to explore attachment theory, and particularly adult attachment. Attachment relationships can be modeled as a location on a two dimension spectrum (low vs. high anxiety, low vs. high avoidance).

These relationship-specific characteristics help individuate the operation of your attachment system:

A good way to diagnose whether your relationship with this girl involves the attachment system is given by Fraley & Shaver (taken from \[ 1 \]):

> First, an attachment bond is marked by the tendency for an individual to remain in close contact with the attachment figure. Second, an attachment figure is used as a safe haven during times of illness, danger, or threat. In other words, the attached individual uses the attachment figure as a haven of safety, protection, and support. Third, an attachment figure is relied on as a secure base for exploration. The presence of the attachment figure promotes feelings of security and confidence, thereby facilitating uninhibited and undistracted exploration. These methods instruct people to nominate one or more individuals whom they use as (a) a target for proximity maintenance, (b) a safe haven, and (c) a secure base. According to Hazan et al.'s cross-sectional research, children primarily nominate their parents for these roles or functions, but adolescents and adults tend to nominate their peers (close friends or romantic partners). According to Hazan et al.'s model, the three functions are serially transferred from one attachment figure, or set of attachment figures, to another, with proximity maintenance being transferred first, followed by safe haven and, finally, secure base. This pattem of transfer corresponds to the stages of attachment development that Ainsworth (1972; elaborating on Bowlby, 1969/1982, pp. 265-268) called "preattachment," "attachment in the making," and "clear-cut attachment." The best candidate for a true attachment relationship is one in which all three functions are present.

However, romantic love is not necessarily synonymous with your attachment system, but can be understood as the confluence of different modules (\[ 1 \]):

> Although romantic love is partly an attachment phenomenon, it involves additional behavioral systems, caregiving and sex, that are empirically intertwined with attachment but theoretically separable.

In contrast, \[ 2 \] view love as the intertwining of lust, attraction, and attachment. I prefer to synthesize the two approaches, and conceptualize full romantic love as the interplay of (at least) lust, attraction, attachment, and caregiving. "Falling in love", then, can be modeled as fusing these modules together; "breaking up" can be modeled as some or all of these modules becoming disassociated with this individual.

In this context, emotions you feel are simply *outputs* of such systems. If you provisionally accept this module language, perhaps you can begin to understand your emotional reaction to this individual. Perhaps you still feel attached because your attachment system is still bound securely, and your caregiving system is still active towards her, etc. You can hope to explain why the "taste of your emotions" differs from most others (why you get blank stares) by appealing to the complexities of the underlying modules and their interactions.

References

\[ 1 \] Fraley & Shaver (2000) - Adult Romantic Attachment: Theoretical Developments, Emerging Controversies, and Unanswered Questions

\[ 2 \] Fisher et al (2006) - Romantic Love: a mammalian brain system for mate choice

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Tags: abnormal-psychology, emotion
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# Question
Title: Why past events reappear in dreams after a certain delay?
I know that Freud in his "Interpretation of dreams" provides a number of examples of events influencing dreams several days to several months after the event has occurred. For example, a person sees a red bicycle in a shop and a week later may have a dream about riding/fixing/seeing the same type of red bicycle. Freud provides on example where an event took place months before the dream.

My question is: **Has there been any research that explained why there can be a long (4-7 days) delay between a real life event and a dream with elements from the event?**

Just to clarify, these are not recurring dreams, but single occurrence dreams about past experiences. Typically the delay between the event and the dream is several days.

# Answer
Because memory is consolidated during sleep (and dreaming).

http://learnmem.cshlp.org/content/11/6/671.full

http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/04/26/dreams-are-key-to-memory/13157.html

There are also some psychological benefits from easing painful memories.

http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/11/23/dream-sleep/
> 1 votes

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Tags: memory, sleep, dreams, long-term-memory
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# Question
Title: Is it possible to induce the processes that occur during sleep such as memory "garbage collection" without actually sleeping?
Some time ago I opened a question comparing drug withdrawal and sleep deprivation symptoms.

In fact, my main objective for that question was to know if there was by any chance, a possibility to live without sleeping.

I got a good answer for the “Why we need sleep?” question, mentioning all the injuries that its deprivation causes.

So here are my current questions :

1. What really happens in our brain during sleep that makes us feel much more "light" when we wake up and that its deprivation kills us? Is it memory cleanup?
2. Is there any research done on the reproduction of those “cleanup” processes without sleeping?

# Answer
> 2 votes
The so-called glymphatic system, pump washing the brain with cerebrospinal fluid during sleep, has already been mentioned in answer to the SE question "Do you need to sleep every night?" It seems more than just a memory cleanup process as if on a computer, but "has significant implications for treating 'dirty brain diseases like Alzheimer's" and understanding it "is a critical first step in efforts to modulate this system and make it work more efficiently" (Maiken Nedergaard). That should go towards answering Q2, at least if such interventions take place in the waking state at the experimental stage.

Another recent report concerns brain cells known as microglia, which also play a role in mopping up neurotoxic brain waste such as beta-amyloids. In addition they monitor the growth of synapses and prune connections between neurons so that the brain can refine its circuits and conserve resources, particularly during adolescence. Relevant maybe, as this is a period in life known for prolonged sleep. Some research on mice suggests a preference on the part of microglia for carrying out their work when the organism is in darkness. Hyperactive microglia however are conjectured to be implicated in Alzheimer's by stripping too many synapses when these are inadvertently tagged by the brain for destruction.

References:

"To Sleep, Perchance to Clean. Study\* reveals brain takes out the trash while we sleep" University of Rochester News Room 17 Oct 2013

\*Nedergaard M (corresponding author) et al "Sleep drives metabolite clearance from the adult brain" Science 18 Oct 2013

"The Mind Minders - a fertile, flexible brain couldn't live without its roving band of caretakers". New Scientist, 12 Oct 2013.

# Answer
> 1 votes
There has been studies that shown that cerebrospinal fluid's circulation in the brain is dramatically(20x) increased during sleep. It is believed that **during sleep, cerebrospinal fluid circulation helps clear out toxic by products of brain metabolism.**

> As a result, the cerebrospinal fluid could not only flow more freely but it could also reach further into the brain. In an awake brain, it would flow only along the brain’s surface. Indeed, the awake flow was a mere 5 percent of the sleep flow. In a sleeping brain, waste was being cleared two times faster. “We saw almost no inflow of cerebrospinal fluid into the brain when the mice were awake, but **then when we anesthetized them,** it started flowing. It’s such a big difference

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/12/opinion/sunday/goodnight-sleep-clean.html?\_r=0

http://www.nih.gov/researchmatters/october2013/10282013clear.htm

Just a guess - if anesthesia improves cerebrospinal fluid flow, maybe then a combination of isolation/sensory deprivation tankand anesthesia would help achieve a cleansing effect? Either way, it does not appear that a human can be running around and working during such cleanup.

# Answer
> 0 votes
This answer seems pretty obvious to me. Maybe? Yes with enough genetic engineering or chemical perturbation it might be possible to remove the need for sleep because it is uncertain if all multicellular organism sleep at this time. If it ever is proven that all multicellular organisms must sleep then the answer would be No.

1. I’ll cannibalize the user what’s comment:

> Read the Wikipedia article on sleep: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep Sleep appears to have phyisiological functions (healing, rejuvenation etc.) that go beyond mere memory funtions. On the other hand people meditating or doing yoga report needing less sleep and feeling refreshed after their exercises. Both practices induce states similar to sleep (relaxation, brain waves, disregard of outside stimuli), which might explain how they can have similar effects. – what yesterday

2. I will say there is a definate connection between states of consciousness and memory rejuvenation especially sleep and memory however the exact methods are largely unknown. Thought I was able to find one paper:

> Taken together, these observations that signaling lipids participate in synaptic plasticity, cognition, and survival indicate that lipid signaling is closely associated with several functions (e.g; learning and memory, sleep, and experimental stroke) and pathologic events. Alterations in endogenous signaling lipids or their receptors resulting from drug abuse lead to changes in synaptic circuitry and induce profound effects on these important functions.

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, sleep
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# Question
Title: What would happen if we cut the corpus callosum?
How would a two-halved brain work? If it would, could we still control things like motion, and would hearing, vision, and other senses still function?

# Answer
Basically the same as a normal two-halved brain. Circumstances in which function is altered are fairly limited. For details, see case reports on Wikipedia's split-brain page, and this episode of Scientific American Frontiers that features Mike Gazzaniga's research, as mentioned here. Gazzaniga's research was reviewed in a Nature news feature (Wolman, 2012), which you may also find helpful.

Also, yes to all questions of control, except maybe hearing...not sure how we control that normally, other than in terms of attention (see "Do we only hear what we want to hear?"), which still operates normally AFAIK. Control breaks down unusually in mostly special circumstances where stimuli are presented to only one side of the brain. Both ears usually hear most sounds, and both eyes' fields of vision overlap quite a lot, so these circumstances need to be created experimentally to demonstrate really clear effects.
> 1 votes

# Answer
I've asked this question about dominance of brain hemispheres. in the question there are examples of drawings made by split brain patients using only one hand and eye at a time. I don't know if using both eyes while drawing produces different results, but the images suggest that the ability to process memory of objects is impaired:
> 1 votes

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Tags: neuroanatomy, brain-injury, lateralization
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# Question
Title: How to run "inhibition of return" experiments online?
Are there online platforms for running inhibition of return experiments? I want to analyze different cultural groups and an online platform would be the only way to do so.

# Answer
Yes your experiment is possible. If all you need is the cued and uncued times its easy. Users can run an online applet demo provided by psytoolkit. You can embed the applet in a survey where users can record their times. For more in detail data analysis I recommend that you roll your own based on psytoolkits model. Given how simple the experiment is even starting from scratch should be easy for a computer science undergrad with some experience in .net or another web language.
> 1 votes

# Answer
I've done quite a lot of work on running experiments online over the last while, and have put together some of the code I've found useful in a project tentatively titled PsychScript.

You will still need to actually program the experiment yourself in JavaScript, but with PsychScript you can do this by modifying a template and changing things around a little, rather than working from scratch.

Hope thing helps!
> 1 votes

# Answer
I've been developing an online platform to run HTML5/Javascript experiments, recruit participants via email, facebook, or twitter, and collect and evaluate results in real time. Neither you nor your participants require anything but a web browser.

As Eoin already mentioned you will still need to develop the experiment yourself in HTML5/Javascript. However I may be able to help you with development, but please consider that the experiment would be open to the general public then.

Please see http://statode-demo.herokuapp.com/mental-rotation/ for a demo, it does not require signup.
> 1 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, perception, measurement, experimental-psychology, test
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title: Self-reflection? Mindfulness?

text:
# Question
Title: Self-reflection? Mindfulness?
How to call such a cognitive process of a person, who often keeps monitoring his or her behaviour by asking oneself questions like "why you are doing it" or "what do you really want to attain", someone who investigates the real causes of his/her behaviour, even if it's painful and requires to face defence mechanisms? I thought it was a ''self-reflection'' or a ''mindfulness''... but I'm not sure \[Please don't give me a link to wikipedia, 'cause this article is not finished\]. Thank you in advance :)

I ask this question in the context of doing some research or writing some popular science article or reviewing some science literature about it. It's easier to dig in Ebsco bases knowing which term is proper. I just don't want to end up confusing terms, like many laypeople do with "fear" and "neuroticism".

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

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

You could also say self conscious but that is sometimes associated with a negative emotion.
> 3 votes

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Tags: social-psychology, personality
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# Question
Title: What exactly is the neurobiological mechanism behind the functioning of the human muscle?
From what I have read, its been given that muscle functioning and coordination involves two processes: frequency summation and muscle recruitment. What I want to know is that, do these two processes work simultaneously or are these two stages separate? As in, both frequency summation and muscle recruitment contributes to modulating the amount of force which makes me wonder why two processes are required to satisfy the same purpose?

The conclusion I could come to was that, frequency summation applies to only a single muscle fiber and when the fiber saturates and no more force can be recruited more muscles are recruited to increase the amount of force applied. An example scenario of this occurring would be a person is lifting a very heavy object. I want to know whether my inference is right or wrong? If wrong I would like someone to explain to me the exact mechanism.

# Answer
> 2 votes
Both recruitment and firing rate contribute to the overall "strength" of muscle action, but there are early and late stage depending on the load under which the muscles are operating. This allows more precision for lighter objects (where muscle recruitment is the dominant mechanism). For heavier objects, most of the muscles get recruited and all the body can do at that point is increase the firing rate more. Note that **throughout the whole process, both mechanisms are occuring**: it's just a matter of which mechanism dominates at which stage/degree of muscle exertion.

And this makes sense: for smaller objects that you will be manipulating, you want more precision, so having muscle recruitment control gives you that spatial precision that allows you to manipulate objects (like tools) in novel ways. Whereas when you're just trying to lift a giant rock, to block a small stream, there isn't much precision required, you're just trying to get it to go a general direction (up and over), so you recruit all muslces and drive the spiking frequency as high as it will go. Whether you fail or not at these extreme loads depends on your personal pain tolerance and your muscle's tensile strength (people with a higher pain tolerance are more likely to snap a tendon or muscle, or even bone).

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Tags: neuroscience
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# Question
Title: Efficiency drop when joining and splitting teams
What will happen when a team is either split or joined with another team? After reading about Tuckman's stages of group development, I understand that the new team will probably start at the beginning or go back a few stages depending on how much they know each other and how much they have worked together before.

My questions are:

* Has there has been done any research on why you should or should not join or merge teams in short time periods?
* By how much will the efficiency drop by on average?
* How long does it take on average to become as efficient as before?

EDIT: To read more about tuckman's stages of group development you can go to this site. There is also some books written but to get a quick introduction this would suffice.

# Answer
> 1 votes
> Has there has been done any research on why you should or should not join or merge teams in short time periods?

One big difference in how the troops were maintained in the second world war was that for the allied forces when a person died/got seriously injured this person was always replaced with another one (under the assumption "you always want the troops to be fully staffed"), whereas the Germans did not replace troop members and the troop kept its original staffing until it became too small when it was just broken up (motivated by group dynamics as you are asking about).

It seems at first a bit counter intuitive, but the Germans performed better due to their strategy than just continuously replace personnel. I am sure there exists a lot of research into this.

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Tags: social-psychology, performance, io-psychology
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# Question
Title: Does straightening your back increase confidence?
**Background:** I have always felt moderately socially insecure. Today I noticed that when I straighten my back from its normal crestfallen position, I feel a little more confident, and as if I were in attack mode.

**Is there any relationship between straightening your back and confidence or other personal characteristics?**

# Answer
> 12 votes
The other answers cite minor effects related to your phenomena, but there's something more pervasive going on.

In Carney et al's research report "Power Posing: Brief Nonverbal Displays Affect Neuroendocrine Levels and Risk Tolerance", it was found that "power posing" increases testosterone and cortisol levels which leads to, among other things, a greater tolerance of risk in general — which is practically the definition of confidence.

Here's the abstract of their study.

> Humans and other animals express power through open, expansive postures, and they express powerlessness through closed, contractive postures. But can these postures actually cause power? The results of this study confirmed our prediction that posing in high-power nonverbal displays (as opposed to low-power nonverbal displays) would cause neuroendocrine and behavioral changes for both male and female participants: High-power posers experienced elevations in testosterone, decreases in cortisol, and increased feelings of power and tolerance for risk; low-power posers exhibited the opposite pattern. In short, posing in displays of power caused advantaged and adaptive psychological, physiological, and behavioral changes, and these findings suggest that embodiment extends beyond mere thinking and feeling, to physiology and subsequent behavioral choices. That a person can, by assuming two simple 1-min poses, embody power and instantly become more powerful has real-world, actionable implications.

Their paper explains both the ontogenetic and the phylogenetic causes of your experience nicely and can be found here.

Cheers.

# Answer
> 12 votes
Brinol et al (2009) suggest that your intuitions generalize. From the abstract:

> Building on the notion of embodied attitudes, we examined how body postures can inﬂuence self-evaluations by affecting thought conﬁdence, a meta-cognitive process. Speciﬁcally, participants were asked to think about and write down their best or worse qualities while they were sitting down with their back erect and pushing their chest out (conﬁdent posture) or slouched forward with their back curved (doubtful posture). Then, participants completed a number of measures and reported their self-evaluations. In line with the self-validation hypothesis, we predicted and found that **the effect of the direction of thoughts (positive/negative) on self-related attitudes was signiﬁcantly greater when participants wrote their thoughts in the conﬁdent than in the doubtful posture**. These postures did not inﬂuence the number or quality of thoughts listed, but did have an impact on the conﬁdence with which people held their thoughts.

### References

* Briñol, P., Petty, R. E. & Wagner, B. (2009). Body posture effects on self-evaluation: A self-validation approach. *European Journal of Social Psychology*, *39*, 6, 1053-1064. PDF

# Answer
> 3 votes
From my personal experience I can tell you that the most confidence you get with strenthening of your shoulders (upper back), biceps and arms in general and most importantly the core (stomach).

Bruce Lee (and other fighters would agree) used to say that core muscles are the most important in fight and who will win (if the fighters are similar) depends highly on the strength of their core.

Another thing is that when you are not straight the organism thinks that you are not in charge wherever you are. Children start to stoop, when the teacher wants to test them. The same for animals.

So, I think that the physical position actually send some signals to the brain and other organs to produce some chemicals that will affect your behavior.

Personal advice: If you feel insecure try to start doing some martial art. E.g. Boxing is very good for confidence or Jeet Kune Do or Krav Maga. Or just buy a boxing bag and throw some punches in your garage (or practice some shadow boxing if you don't have a bag) every day before going to sleep. Boxing is probably the best way to boost your confidence. If your muscles became bigger, the muscle tissue is producing more testosterone and you became more aggressive = bigger confidence ;)

# Answer
> 0 votes
Changing body expression does provably change how we feel. A study was made where some participants read comics with a pen in their mouth in a way simulating a smile while some other were reading it with the pen placed so it should simulate more of a frown. The smile group reported significantly higher amusement ratings than the other group.

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Tags: social-psychology, emotion, well-being, mood
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title: Can changing attitude cure depression?

text:
# Question
Title: Can changing attitude cure depression?
There's a proverb: "everything's decided in mind" - changing attitude of thing may help going through things.

Does it also mean that if someone is depressed then there'd be enough to change how he sees the world to cure his/her depression? Or is it a deeper problem?

# Answer
> 5 votes
The proverb you mention is overly general to the point of being largely false (or at least unfalsifiable, to give some credit to the defensibility of philosophical solipsism otherwise). @JunJun and @felino's answers also generalize too much, but this is partly a consequence of a lack of specificity in the OP. Depression in general is widely misunderstood and commonly oversimplified.

I prefer to conceptualize depression in general as a latent, dimensional, symptomatic state that is linked to its causes by theory, not by definition. This means not directly measured, not truly dichotomous (like clinical diagnosis often is – people are generally either diagnosed as having a mood disorder or not having one, but whether they truly are depressed is more a matter of degree), not a disease or disorder per se but rather a consequence thereof, and not defined as resulting from any one cause. This concept permits research to identify several partial influences that may operate together or separately to produce depression, and this is in fact what research on depression has done.

As @what points out, depression is known to have both genetic and environmental influences. Environmental influences are certainly not decided exclusively in the mind – this is the first reason your proverb overgeneralizes. Second, genetic influences are hardly *decided* in the sense of being voluntary. What remains may permit voluntary intervention, but not every case of depression leaves anything remaining.

* Some cases arise entirely due to overwhelming, unforeseeable, and effectively unavoidable stress.
* Some cases arise entirely due to genetic or other neurochemical influences (e.g., drugs, disorders).

Attitude change may aid coping in these circumstances, but one could hardly expect it to cure depressed affect altogether when one has good reasons to feel depressed or no real control over its sources.

However, many cases may arise from problematic attitudes (e.g., low self-esteem, external locus of control, social alienation). As mentioned in my answer to "https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/q/5803/4086" Lyubomirsky (2008) argues that for average people in average circumstances, roughly 2/5 of one's happiness may be altered voluntarily, as through attitude change:

> (source: edbatista.com) (Based on Lyubomirsky, 2008)

Again, this won't be true in every case, especially those affected by special circumstances or involuntary or biological factors. Still, in many cases, it's enough malleability to facilitate important changes. In a falsely dichotomous model of depression, it's plenty of room in which to cross a clinical threshold and thereby become "not depressed". From a more dimensional standpoint, it's not going to allow anyone to change from the most depressed person to the happiest or vice versa: it's only enough to allow a percentile change of roughly 40% on average.

Several therapeutic modalities and positive psychological interventions incorporate attitude change, e.g.:

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**Reference**
Lyubomirsky, S. (2008). *The how of happiness: A scientific approach to getting the life you want*. Penguin.

# Answer
> 3 votes
I'm not any kind of professional in this field, but I can say just a few things about this from experience in my family.

I thought depressive feelings and being diagnosed with depression are one and the same. But health of a family member gave me insight into feelings that can't be changed just because your belief changes.

Depressed person, with altered brain chemistry, is not a person whose mood you can change by persuading him/her and changing his/her beliefs. Once brain chemistry is not in balance, like in average healthy person, it's not a healthy brain anymore. You can feel ups and downs, but depressed person is feeling down or pretending to be ok. It's not a regular mood wave of the day.

Also, even if you could present to such person different beliefs, I believe they are unable to change/learn because of their dark mood. I mean, who in the world learns with mind focused on depressive thoughts?

Person that isn't ill, and is just feeling down during the day is the one that can change their depressive feeling with change of beliefs, because it's temporary anyway.

For example, when I feel down, i have two options, keep feeling down until it's gone on it's own,or look at my belief and check if I'm too negative/harsh. But someone who is ill,isn't really capable of looking inwards with compassion or with rationality,for that matter. It's really two different worlds.

I hope this helps any.

# Answer
> 1 votes
I'm not an expert but I would like to try an answer.

Freud said:

> There's a story behind every person. There's a reason why they're the way they are. They aren't just like that because they want to. Something in the past created them, and sometimes it's impossible to fix them.

Wayne Dyer in his main book clearly explains the influence of the education on the making of our beliefs.

The cognitive psychology explains how beliefs, emotions and behavior are strongly bound each together.

For personal experience I can state that changing our beliefs is a really slow process. It's like drop some colour in a point of a spider net. The color changes but the net has thousand of joints and it's hard to spread the change of color to all the joints.

There are techniques such as the EMDR for helping at spreading the thought restructuration from more and more thoughts.

Some one may state that Freud's sentence is lacking of a scientific evidence based demostration, but it doesn't mean that it's false. It only mean that it should be proved by other researches. And that it could be partially true and partially false.

However an intuitive proof of the validity of Freud theory could come by Warren Buffet.

> Warren Buffett took the Dale Carnegie course "How to Win Friends and Influence People" when he was 20 years old, and to this day has the diploma in his office.

I simply think that it's very intuitive that it's easier to be happier if we are winner and receive positive feedback by the society, and this can be learned as everything else. I believe that the available data on the effectiveness of cognitive & comportamental psychotherapy at solving anxiety, doc, anxious attack and depression proves this hypothesis very well.

: Brady, Diane (July 22, 2013). "Charles Manson's turning point: Dale Carnegie classes". Business Week. Retrieved October 23, 2013.

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Tags: depression
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# Question
Title: Is there a bias where long statements, books, articles, etc. are seen as more truthful?
Is there a cognitive biasing effect that makes people believe that long statements / expressions / articles / books are more truthful than short ones (assuming that they are equal semantically)?

# Answer
> 5 votes
Message length is a peripheral cue in the elaboration likelihood model. This means that a message's length affects the likelihood that its recipient will be persuaded when the recipient is not scrutinizing the message's content attentively. When a message is evaluated through peripheral attention instead of central focus, simple heuristics that are easily fooled determine the extent of persuasion that results.

Petty and Cacioppo (1986, part 1) cite their earlier study (Petty & Cacioppo, 1984) as demonstrating that more arguments in favor of a message increases attitude positivity toward the message when the audience is not personally invested in understanding it **even if the arguments are weak**. This doesn't work when the audience is highly involved – then a greater number of weak arguments only makes attitudes worse.

Petty and Cacioppo (1986, part 2) also cite Wood, Kallgren, and Preisler's (1985) study, which persuaded its relatively inattentive participants more strongly with long messages than short messages. Again, this effect did not vary with message quality, but disappeared among participants who paid closer attention.

@Eoin recommended Heit and Rotello (2012), who replicated the results of Wood and colleagues. In fact, they even found the effect of message length among participants who were **told not to judge arguments by length**. This also occurred when listening to verbal arguments. Good stuff...

**References**
\- Heit, E., & Rotello, C. M. (2012). The pervasive effects of argument length on inductive reasoning. Thinking & Reasoning, 18(3), 244-277. Retrieved from http://faculty.ucmerced.edu/sites/default/files/eheit/files/argument%202012.pdf.
\- Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1984). The effects of involvement on responses to argument quantity and quality: Central and peripheral routes to persuasion. *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46*(1), 69–81. Retrieved from http://psychology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/cacioppo/jtcreprints/pc84a.pdf.
\- Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion. *Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 19*, 123–205. Retrieved from http://psychology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/cacioppo/jtcreprints/pc86.part1.pdf (part 1), http://psychology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/cacioppo/jtcreprints/pc86.part2.pdf (part 2), and http://psychology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/cacioppo/jtcreprints/pc86.part3.pdf (part 3).
\- Wood, W., Kallgren, C. A., & Preisler, R. M. (1985). Access to attitude-relevant information in memory as a determinant of persuasion: The role of message attributes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 21(1), 73–85. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/nZgcNz.

# Answer
> 3 votes
It seems like a casual version of the illusion of validity, but the illusion of validity is a more general bias that additional data generates additional validity. It's often used more in a lab setting then a debate setting, where an additional experiment may be included to lend support to a hypothesis, but the experimental outcome isn't actually surprising given the results of other experiments.

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Tags: bias
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# Question
Title: Is there any scientific evidence that nootropics improve synaptic plasticity / learning ability?
I'm attempting to learn a very specific skill (perfect pitch) and I'm considering nootropic supplements.

While I can find plenty of websites offering these supplements and making big claims, I can't find any rigourous scientific experiments backing these claims.

On the other hand I can't find any rigourous scientific experiments debunking them.

I would imagine such an experiment would not be too hard to set up; for example, performance on a simple "pairs" card game could give a measure of short-term memory.

How might I intelligently go about searching for such experimental results?

# Answer
I'll have to leave it to someone else to provide real expert advice and references on this point but I do offer the following skeptical points.

## Brain Training Doesn't Work

To my knowledge, there is no reliable data whatsoever that says domain general brain-training has any effect. Basically, you can spend as long as you like practice pitch recognition, or anagrams, or any other cognitive task, but the transfer to unpracticed tasks will be minimal - you'll simply improve at the task you've practiced. **You cannot increase IQ/Working Memory/Cognitive Capacity in this way**. See, for example, Owen et al, 2010. The only benefit accrued from these games is in cases of cognitive decline, such as dementia, Alzheimers, and other neurodegenerative conditions, where training can slow decline.

## Nootropic Drugs Don't Work

I've seen no evidence, ever, that shows long term benefits of nootropics, beyond the usual, possibly valid claims about fatty acids found in fish. I can't find references for this right now, unfortunately, but really the onus is on those who claim that these supplements do have an effect to point to unbiased evidence.
> 5 votes

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Tags: learning
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# Question
Title: Why would someone seek treatment for Apraxia of speech?
People with Apraxia of speech have two basic problems: monotone pronunciation and slow speech.

(**1**) Might someone with Apraxia of speech who does not seek treatment have psychological problems? They just don't care about not talking with people who don't want to wait and listen to their thoughts. Is that arrogance? low self-esteem? severely anti-social?

(**2**) Is Apraxia of speech degenerative? Without treatment, speaking will become more, and more, difficult?

(**3**) Is it socially unacceptable to speak slowly with a monotone pronunciation?

# Answer
> 2 votes
There appear to be more than your two basic problems: see Wikipedia's list of characteristics. Subjective difficulty in producing speech appears to be one particularly plausible reason to self-initiate treatment.

1. I don't see any indication of a lack of concern for how speech is received by others.
2. Some forms seem to be progressive, but not all are:

> Recent research has established the existence of primary progressive apraxia of speech caused by neuroanatomic motor atrophy.\[19\]\[20\]

By comparison, stroke can introduce acute apraxia of speech that can (rarely) improve over time.
3. I wouldn't say "unacceptable", but *undesirable* seems true enough in general. Plenty of variation in rate of speech is normal and acceptable, but extremely slow speech can be grating. Tonal variation is expected in most languages with which I'm at all familiar, but again, most people probably understand that some people will be more or less monotone. Again, extreme monotonicity will tend to violate expectations and raise complaints, because variations in pitch and emphasis carry useful semantic information in normal speech. Personally, I've been criticized for speaking in monotone at many times in my life, but never for having too wildly fluctuating intonation, even though I've tried to exaggerate this quality somewhat compensatorily. Yet as with all anecdotes, your mileage may vary.

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**References**
19. Josephs, K. A., & Duffy, J. R. (2008). Apraxia of speech and nonfluent aphasia: A new clinical marker for corticobasal degeneration and progressive supranuclear palsy. *Current Opinion in Neurology, 21*(6), 688–692.
20. Josephs, K. A., Duffy, J. R., Strand, E. A., Machulda, M. M., Senjem, M. L., Master, A. V., Lowe, V. J., Jack, C. R. Jr., & Whitwell, J. L. (2012). Characterizing a neurodegenerative syndrome: Primary progressive apraxia of speech. *Brain, 135*(5), 1522–1536. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3338923/.

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Tags: social-psychology, linguistics, neurology
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title: Is it possible to develop curiosity?

text:
# Question
Title: Is it possible to develop curiosity?
I know that curiosity is developed kinda on it's own. You don't know when you'll become curious. But is it possible to train one's mind to become curious about certain subject? I've seen titles and tips on "how" to become curious, but I don't think those "X steps" will make someone's mind budge.

Is it possible to sort of prime oneself to become curious? Mind priming seams powerful for certain things, and it's only thing that I thought could work. Again, priming mind that knows it's gonna be primed sounds rather tricky.

Note: I know the question is messy,so please,do correct me and tag appropriately if needed . :)

# Answer
On a related note, I attempted an answer on the question: *What causes a person to be curious, inquisitive and explorative?*

**Context**

The younger generations (like mine) have developed in an over-stimulated environment. We are no longer satisfied nor amazed by simple things. As budgets for show-business and entertainment companies grew, so did our standards for amazement and wonder. \[\]

> *In our increasingly complex world, the amount of information required to master any particular discipline — e.g. computers, life insurance, medicine — has expanded geometrically. We are forced to become specialists, people who know more and more about less and less.* \[\]

Like this quote denotes, I sometimes feel that everything is already explored or have been done before. This vision often cause a reflex to search for existing answers before even tackling a problem on my own.

He continues by saying that we are not going to school because of an initial desire to learn and understand the world, but because the existing world wants us to learn what it considers important:

> *In this frightening new world, students do not turn to universities for mind expansion but vocational training.* \[\]

**Factors of influence**

Motivation (in any flavor) can be influenced by personality characteristics, environmental factors and social situations. For example, there is a negative correlation between being in a depressed state and demonstrating curiosity in general.

> *It has been suggested that **a decline in curiosity is one characteristic manifested by depressed individuals**. \[...\] Results indicated that subjects made temporarily depressed reported significantly less state curiosity, perceived value of information, and desire for additional knowledge than elated or neutral subjects.* \[\]

Now if we look at *Maslow's hierarchy of needs*, it seems obvious that people with less satisfied needs are not naturally led to be curious. This implies that any society, family or individual that never approves the work of others, that can't provide security or food to its members doesn't provide an environment suitable for curiosity to develop.

There might also be physiological and developmental predispositions to grow up curious about the world. You can read more about these **here** and **here**.

**Training?**

*The next section is highly subjective as it contains personal opinions*

While there are things you can do to increase the likelihood of becoming curious about a particular subjects, I don't believe curiosity is something you can unlock with a magical treatment. Don't force it. It develops with time and new experiences.

Thing I would suggest:

* Making practical uses of a subject, making links to other subjects you are already interested in. For instance, I became highly motivated in math and physics classes after finding an application for it in 3D game development. On another note, some people tackle life's problems with metaphors of things they know well.
* Breaking the desire for stability, security and familiarity. Here is some media on the subject: *Sell your crap. Pay your debt. Do what you love*, *Fuck your comfort zone*.
* Learning to learn (as stereotypical as it may sound) and doing things that you love.
* Surround yourself with curious, motivated and interesting people. It will lead to very interesting discussions and you will learn lots of stuff from each other.
> 4 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, personality, brain-training
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title: Can dreams be memorised?

text:
# Question
Title: Can dreams be memorised?
Would it be possible to activate the human memory and "access" it by means of encouraging certain hormones, to assist a sleeping body to memorize dreams and later (meaning minutes, days, months or even years) access it again with the same hormones - something like a trained body function.

This could perhaps help in solving certain criminal cases or assist in psychological healing (for schizophrenia and the likes). I'm just curious about the possibilities and have absolutely no knowledge of how the brain works. This was just a wild idea that came to mind and I was wondering about the possibilities.

# Answer
I don't know how it is when it goes about hormones but for sure dreams can be remembered and this remembering of dreams can be improved.

One of the most popular methods is trying to think about somebody's dreams just after waking up. It is also important to tell it loudly, record it or write it down. After some time (even few days) of writing down your dreams a person is able to remember not one, but two, three or more dreams from one night.

The case of getting access to your previous dreams lately is connected with lucid dreaming - if you are able to have lucid dreams whenever you want, you also can initiate these situations which you like. But it is much less scientifically described case.
> 2 votes

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Tags: memory, dreams, brain-training
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title: Examples of Psychology in Finance

text:
# Question
Title: Examples of Psychology in Finance
I'm currently taking a course in Risk Management and we have been asked to give a presentation on Psychology and its effect on investment/market behavior. My group has created a solid presentation but we thought that it might be cool to perform a class activity that demonstrates some real life effects. We're considering offering people in the class a fair bet but analysing their decision, or something simple in a similar style. Does anyone know of any easy/cool demonstrations that might be worth looking into?

# Answer
> 3 votes
This is quite a broad question, and the feasibility of any answer will depend on the time and resources available for performing a demonstration, assuming the objective isn't just to present a summary of existing research. A relatively simple principle to demonstrate in a risk management context would be the framing effect, whereby the emphasis on gain or loss in a given decision can affect people's preferences.

To demonstrate this quickly and easily, you could pass out a shuffled deck of small cards to your audience, with one of two versions of a question printed on each card. The question can present a single dilemma from two perspectives: one that frames a decision in terms of how much the respondent stands to gain with one of two choices, and another that frames it in terms of the cost of each choice. If half of the audience gets one version of the question, and the other half gets the other version of the question, you may be able to demonstrate a difference in the choices people make based on which version they receive with a couple polling questions. Wikipedia cites Tversky and Kahneman's (1981) example of a dilemma framed from gain and loss perspectives:

> \[Text from Tversky and Kahneman, 1981:\] Imagine that the U.S. is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual Asian disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. Assume that the exact scientific estimate of the consequences are as follows:
>
> $$\begin{array}{c|c|c}{\rm Framing}&{\rm Treatment A}&{\rm Treatment B}\\\hline{\rm Positive}&\text{"Saves 200 lives"}&\text{"A 33% chance of saving all 600 people,}\\\&&\text{66% possibility of saving no one."}\\\hline{\rm Negative}&\text{"400 people will die"}&\text{"A 33% chance that no people will die,}\\\&&\text{66% probability that all 600 will die."}\end{array}$$ \[Table from Wikipedia\]

Other examples are available, and the principle is general enough that you could probably expect it to work with your own variations on the theme. This particular version produced a 72% preference for Treatment A in the positively framed version, and a 22% preference for Treatment A in the negatively framed version. Tversky and Kahneman also describe several examples with risk framed in terms of financial gain and loss, but they might require a different setup for demonstration. An experimental effect of this size ought to stand a decent chance of appearing even in a fairly small audience.

**Reference**
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1981). The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. *Science, 211*(4481), 453–458. Retrieved from http://psych.hanover.edu/classes/cognition/papers/tversky81.pdf.

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Tags: economics
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# Question
Title: What are the cognitive elements of dangerous behaviors?
I am looking for theories or articles that focused on cognitive elements contributing to risk-taking behaviors. For example it is known that response inhibition is linked to impulsive behaviors. I am looking for any neurocognitive parameters that meet criteria of antisocial personality disorder in DSM-5, especially including impairments in self-functioning such as:

> Self-direction: Goal-setting based on personal gratification; absence of prosocial internal standards associated with failure to conform to lawful or culturally normative ethical behavior.

# Answer
There are correlations betweeen risk behaviours and temperament traits. According to Strelau's theory of temperament (1998) people are devided into those who have low and high demand for stimulation. The second one will probably do risk behaviours more often. There are also anothar temperament traits which can influence sb's behaviour.

You can read more there: Strelau (1998) Temperament: A Psychological Perspective

And some other scientific articles with research results: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0376871603003570 http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/73/5/1052/
> 2 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, abnormal-psychology, cognitive-neuroscience
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title: What causes pathological jealousy?

text:
# Question
Title: What causes pathological jealousy?
Taking the meaning of the word pathological to mean maladaptive and unhealthy.

What is/are the aetiology of pathological jealousy?

What conditions are associated with features of pathological jealousy?

Discussion can concern neurological or psychological problems or both.

# Answer
> 2 votes
I think there are many determinants of jealousy. The very basic one is evolutionary explanation. For example, jealousy was necessary for male to extend his genes. If he wasn't, the another male could "take over" his female partner. Another (more interesting for me) explanation is psychoanalytic one. You can read more for example in Bowlby's books, but also more classic ones. As "more classic" I mean these works which talk about Oedipus complex or other phenomenon which influence our approach (e.g.projection) to other people in future.

1) Buss,Larsen,Westen,Semmelroth - Sex Differences in Jealousy: Evolution, Physiology, and Psychology

2) White, Gregory L.; Mullen, Paul E. (1989) Jealousy: Theory, research, and clinical strategies.

3) Pines, Aronson (2006), Antecedents, correlates, and consequences of sexual jealousy

4) Bowlby (1953) Some pathological processes set in train by early mother-child separation

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Tags: social-psychology, emotion, abnormal-psychology, psychiatry
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