# Question
Title: Are motivation and efficiency inversely correlated?
**Observation:** Motivation and efficiency seem appear to me to be inversely correlated for most people. That is, I know some people who tend to get very excited about a goal and take large amounts of action but fail to plan efficiently, so a large chunk of their work is wasted. Conversely I know a lot of people who can plan and take action efficiently but tend to do comparatively less work (and I tend to fall into this category.)

**Questions:**

* **Is motivation and efficiency inversely correlated?**
* **If so, is there a biological/neuroscientific reason for this?**

For example, perhaps willpower is a finite resource, so that planning literally uses up the energy you have to do other work.

# Answer
> 7 votes
You might find *Self Determination Theory* interesting, which takes a detailed look the concept of motivation. Even if you don't explicitely mention it in your question, you seem to be refering to the difference between *intrinsic* and *extrinsic motivation*, which is a distinction that is traditionally made with respect to motivation.

In SDT this is taken a step further. Gagne & Deci (2005) introduce the distinction between *autonomous* and *controlled motivation*, which can be seen as two endpoints of a continuum. Intrinsic motivation is autonomous, and people who are intrinsically motivated engage in a certain behaviour because they like it, find it interesting, etc. In this sense, the behaviour is self-determined.

To the contrary, behaviour can also be externally controlled (e.g. your boss tells you to do something) and thus not self-determinded. In its most extreme form, this kind of controlled motivation is what we know as extrinsic motivation. However, a task that is extrinsically motivated can be internalized and thus become more autonomous and more important to the individual. Gagne & Deci postulate 3 degrees of Internalization, which vary from low to high. In its most internalized form, which is called *integrated motivation*, the behaviour has become autonomous and is equally important to the individual as intrinsically motivated behaviour, even though not for the same reasons.

In their article, Gagne & Deci (2005) make a couple of propositions derived from the theory, the first one of which also speaks to your question. Because integrated and intrinsic motivations differ in their underlying mechanisms, they should be predictice for performance on different kinds of task. An intrinsically motivated person should perform well on a task that she likes, whereas soemone with integrated motivation should perform well on tasks that require discipline and effort. This proposition has already been tested and confirmed with respect to political envolvement and voting behaviour (Koestner et al., 1996).

References

Gagné, M., & Deci, E. L. (2005). Self‐determination theory and work motivation. *Journal of Organizational behavior*, 26(4), 331-362. PDF

Koestner, R., Losier, G. F., Vallerand, R. J., & Carducci, D. (1996). Identified and introjected forms of political internalization: extending self-determination theory. *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology*, 70, 1025–1036.

# Answer
> 4 votes
Let me take the liberty of rephrasing some of the things you have mentioned. To be highly motivated , as per you, is starting a lot of things (more work), more excitement about new stuff and more efforts put in, but less follow through to completion maybe because a plan was not followed (more open ended stuff) ; efficiency, as per you is, doing less, but doing it well, by following a well established plan/ procedure and getting expected results. Ensuring six sigma compliance would be a matter of being efficient, while perhaps making incremental innovations happen by stretching out and taking risky activities a sign of a motivated individual.

The way I see this, is, as a tension or tradeoff between exploration drive (open ended exploration, too many simultaneous open ended threads, that do motivate in a sense that they bring passion out) and exploitation drive (sticking to what works best and ensuring efficiency by avoiding costly mistakes).

I can clearly see that these exploitation drive and exploration drive are theoretically related to the constructs of Avoid motivation and Approach motivation respectively. In the approach motivation you are driven towards achieving a desired end goal and the actions consequently are more exploratory in nature, you can give rein to your impulses, are more playful, spontaneous; in the Avoid motivation you are more driven by avoiding landing in an undesired state (like making a mistake) and more concerned with exploitation of what you have learned and on the lookout to avoid mistakes and generally anxious/ vigilant/ more planful/ controlled.

As a person will typically have either a predominant Approach orientation or Avoidance orientation, its true that your observation that some seem more motivated/ passionate and others more careful/ efficient would be generally true and finding a balance of both qualities in a single person may be difficult.

As for citation, I would have cited my own (future) posts on PT about this for the larger theoretical framework, but constructs of Approach and Avoidance motivation can be easily found in the works of Elliot/ Shculz or Carver/ Scheier.

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, motivation, performance, correlation
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# Question
Title: To what extent does the awarness of the presence of others affect brain function and cognitive state?
This scope pertains to non-life threatening interactions and the awareness of the presence of a single or multiple individuals - (not direct conversation, ***not*** group mentality) just the presence.

To what extent does the presence of others affect brain function, emotion and cognitive state?

What are the differences within the host that cause certain individuals to evoke stronger cognitive changes vs. those that evoke weaker changes?

What are the changes in state when one is completely sure nobody is around?

Are there any studies that measure this or show what a reasonable standard deviation would be for this phenomenon?

In addition, what are the factors that allow the host to completely block any changes in cognition regardless of the presence of others? (i.e. - higher serotonin, larger frontal cortex, etc?)

# Answer
I recently came across an article (1) examining the effect of an observer on cognitive task performance. The meta-analysis showed an overall negative effect associated with the presence of others leading to a poorer cognitive performance.

I am not aware of an article investigating such an observer effect using brain imaging techniques. It didn't stop researchers (2) to speculate on a cognitive/neuropsychological model of social inhibition. They stated that "the presence of others places high demands on the frontal and executive systems, leaving less available processing capacity to dedicate to performing tasks that require executive and frontal processing. The presence of others may, in turn, facilitate performance on tasks that rely less on frontal and executive processing".

I leave them the final sentence of this post:

"there is clearly potential for more collaboration between social psychologists and those working in cognitive psychology and neuroscience"

(1) Eastvold et al. (2012). Does a Third Party Observer Affect Neuropsychological Test Performance? It Depends. The Clinical Neuropsychologist, 26(3).

(2) Wagstaff et al. (2008). Some cognitive and neuropsychological aspects of social inhibition and facilitation. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 20(4).
> 4 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, social-psychology, emotion, cognitive-neuroscience
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# Question
Title: Recommend a book for studying the brain structure
I know this is kind of a "soft question", but it isn't very easy to find a good, comprehensive brain atlas book, which would also link the different areas to their functions (according to recent work). Best would be if the book could also be used for teaching (from the very basics). Any recommendations? I would not like to pay myself sick in finding a good book. Please provide some insights why the book you recommend is better than the others available (or, if you know just one book, what did you learn from it).

# Answer
I have a couple of reference recommendations for you, please take these with a truck load of salt as I am just an enthusiast in this field - given this, the criteria I tend to go by are - ease-to-understand and interest-factor (ie. gets me thinking) - as I do not know where you are, I am not sure of their costs for you:

Brain, Mind and the Structure of Reality (Nunez, 2010).

This book brings together neuroscience and links it to other related fields related to cognition and how we perceive the world.

Atlas of Brain Function (Orrison, 2008).

This book has a glossary as well as the details and results of imaging.

Biology of Mind (Bownds, 1999).

Even though this reference is a bit dated, it is a good starting point about brain structures and the evolution of the human brain.

Hope these are a bit helpful.
> 6 votes

# Answer
Michael Saunders Gazzaniga, Richard B. Ivry, G. George Ronald Mangun, Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind
> 3 votes

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Tags: reference-request
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# Question
Title: How effective are multiphasic sleep schedules?
Does multiphasic sleep work well enough that it can be used as a replacement for monophasic sleep?

Has there been any research done on people that have used bi/polyphasic sleep for extended periods of time?

Do multiphasic sleep schedules require different eating patterns?

# Answer
Results from experiments with polyphasic sleep are (Stampi, 1992; as summarized in Pinel, Biopsychology):

1. Test subjects needed two weeks or more to get used to a polyphasic sleep cycle.
2. Once test subjects got used to their new sleeping pattern, they were happy with it and showed no deficits in performance tests.
3. Leonardo da Vinci's rhythm of 15 minutes of sleep every four hours works well.
4. Most test subjects slept too long, and were not refreshed, or too short, and were groggy for a few minutes after waking up ("sleep inertia").
5. At first, sleep is mostly slow wave sleep, but after some time the normal relation between slow wave sleep and REM-sleep re-asserts itself.

*Stampi, C. (Ed.) (1992). Evolution, chronobiology, and functions of polyphasic and ultrashort sleep. Boston: Birkhäuser.*

What I don't know and what would interest me:

In a normal monophasic night sleeper, among other things melatonin is high at night, body temperature is low, and, as your question hints at, there is a long break with no food intake. A polyphasic sleeper would disrupt these "natural" (i.e. corresponding to the rhythm of day and night) physiological rhythms, because he probably wouldn't spend his nightly wakeful hours inactive and in darkness. I don't know, what (longterm) effects this might have.

Stampi's book is rather old now, and I'm sure there is more recent research. Maybe some of these open questions have been answered by now.
> 9 votes

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Tags: sleep, physiology
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# Question
Title: What does Lumosity's Flexibility measure?
One of the Lumosity BPI measurements is termed Flexibility. What is this measuring?

# Answer
I believe they are attempting to measure Cognitive Flexibility (there is a citation linking to Lumosity at the very end of the article).

From the Wiki article:

> ***Cognitive flexibility*** has been described as the mental ability to switch between thinking about two different concepts, and to think about multiple concepts simultaneously....
>
> Other terms for *cognitive flexibility* include mental flexibility, shifting, mental set or cognitive shifting, task switching/shifting, and attention switching/shifting....
>
> Most commonly, *cognitive flexibility* refers to the mental ability to adjust thinking or attention in response to changing goals and/or environmental stimuli....
>
> Lastly, the ability to simultaneously consider two aspects of an object, idea, or situation at one point in time refers to *cognitive flexibility*. According to this definition, when sorting cards based on specific rules, children are considered *cognitively flexible* rules if they can sort cards based on the color of the objects and type of objects on the card simultaneously. Similarly, *cognitive flexibility* has been defined as having the understanding and awareness of all possible options and alternatives simultaneously within any given situation.

I hope that helps!
> 2 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, brain-training
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title: Oddball experiment design in E-prime

text:
# Question
Title: Oddball experiment design in E-prime
I want to set up an experiment in which there are 3 types of emotional stimuli (A, B, C). A and C would have a 1% recurrence probability, for rare and unexpected stimuli. Is there any sample of oddball paradigm for E-Prime?

# Answer
Pstnet, the editor of Eprime, does not provide a sample for oddball paradigms. And sharing Eprime scripts is rare but you may find a script of interest here

http://www.nitrc.org/frs/download.php/283/AO\_version110804.zip

This is part of an initiative described at http://www.birncommunity.org/resources/tools/fire-primer/multi-site-cognitive-paradigms-for-fmri-studies. File summaries are here http://www.nitrc.org/projects/fbirn (click on "see all files"). This auditory oddball file is far from being a sample though.
> 3 votes

# Answer
Not that it answers your specific question, but there is this Inquisit script for auditory oddball: http://millisecond.com/download/library/oddball

There is a 30-day trial version of Inquisit.
> 1 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, measurement, experimental-psychology, emotion
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# Question
Title: Have there been any studies which report a positive correlation between eating certain foods and reported sleep disturbances?
This Skeptics question touched on the subject, but I'm more focused on studies that have been conducted under highly controlled circumstances, like a university sleep lab.

We've all heard these old wives' tales about eating before you go to bed, but is there any evidenced-based, physiological basis for certain components of foods that can cross the blood brain barrier and induce nightmares or other parasomnias?

# Answer
> 6 votes
According to the article "Relationship between Food Intake and Sleep Pattern in Healthy Individuals" (Crispin et al. 2011), there appeared to be a gender based differences in how certain food intake affects sleep patterns. Additionally, the time the food was eaten also affects sleep patterns.

A couple of key points from the linked article's conclusions:

> intake of high fat and carbohydrate foods preceding the sleeping period are associated with higher sleep latency. Other studies19,20 have demonstrated that individuals who ingested a high-glycemic index, carbohydrate-rich meal 4 hours prior to sleep presented a decrease in sleep latency. In addition to the amount of carbohydrates, the glycemic index may have an important influence on sleep patterns, especially in inducing sleepiness. Different types of fat have also been shown to influence sleep.

and

> ..Data from this study suggest that individuals who consume meals with increased fat content in the nocturnal period seem predisposed to have decreased REM sleep.

and

> ..high caloric food intake preceding the sleeping period was correlated with greater sleep latency in women (nocturnal caloric intake correlated positively with sleep latency).

(The full article is available at the above link).

Further, this About.com article, describes specific examples, such as cherries, which contain melatonin, that helps regulate sleep.

Even though the second link is not all that authorative, there are a number of peer-reviewed papers presented as its bibliography, namely:

Afaghi A, O'Connor H, Chow CM."High-glycemic-index carbohydrate meals shorten sleep onset." Am J Clin Nutr. 2007 Feb;85(2):426-30. (full HTML article)

Burkhardt S, Tan DX, Manchester LC, Hardeland R, Reiter RJ."Detection and quantification of the antioxidant melatonin in Montmorency and Balaton tart cherries (Prunus cerasus)." J Agric Food Chem. 2001 Oct;49(10):4898-902. (full PDF article)

Gruber R, Xi T, Frenette S, Robert M, Vannasinh P, Carrier J. "Sleep disturbances in prepubertal children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: a home polysomnography study." Sleep. 2009 Mar 1;32(3):343-50. (Full HTML article)

Nedeltcheva AV, Kilkus JM, Imperial J, Kasza K, Schoeller DA, Penev PD."Sleep curtailment is accompanied by increased intake of calories from snacks." Am J Clin Nutr. 2009 Jan;89(1):126-33. Epub 2008 Dec 3. (Full HTML article)

Ozsungur S, Brenner D, El-Sohemy A."Fourteen well-described caffeine withdrawal symptoms factor into three clusters." Psychopharmacology (Berl). 2009 Jan;201(4):541-8. Epub 2008 Sep 16.c(Full PDF article)

Shi Z, McEvoy M, Luu J, Attia J. "Dietary fat and sleep duration in Chinese men and women." Int J Obes (Lond). 2008 Dec;32(12):1835-40. Epub 2008 Nov 4. (Full HTML article)

I hope this helps.

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Tags: sleep, physiology, feeding
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title: How does fever affect time perception?

text:
# Question
Title: How does fever affect time perception?
Many of my friends and I have noticed that at certain stages of fever, time is often perceived as being longer than usual. I'd like to know if this is caused by the disease itself, an immune reaction, or high body temperature.

Fun fact: a lot of gamers I know have told me that their performance in first person shooter games increases while they have fever. I also noticed that works for me and as far as a ill person's judgment goes, I think that fever disrupts prolonged concentration on a single task, which makes it easier to interchange current objectives (like from "going there" to "defending from that guy out of nowhere" almost instantly). I'd like to know if it's true and if it is related to fever at all.

# Answer
> 4 votes
Experiments reported in the article "Feeling the heat: body temperature and the rate of subjective time, revisited." (Weardon and Penton-Voak, 1995) observed that in many cases the rate of subjective time *increased* with increased body temperature. They suggest that a possible mechanism being that body temperature change also results in a change in arousal state.

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Tags: physiology, time, arousal
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# Question
Title: Neural Mechanisms of Accumulation and Triggering
What is the mechanism by which the brain/mind 'accumulates' a felt-sense to a point of 'triggering' an action?

For example, if unable to complete a task (e.g. opening packaging), a person can feel increased frustration for each attempt at the task. Eventually, the level of frustration will reach a 'trigger-point' and a compensatory action ('will you open it for me?') can occur.

I see this in many areas of human life (though frustration is the most common/obvious example), so I would suspect that it's a general principle of neural action than a specific mechanism of tracking sensory perceptions.

Also, apologies for any unclear language or concepts. I will happily rewrite if necessary.

\[EDIT\]:
For clarity, I'm more curious about the 'accumulation' and less about the 'triggering'. Also, with regards to accumulation, I'm particularly curious about accumulation over longer time periods. So, not just task-specific frustration (as an example), but also things such as life skills.

So, another example: talking to a specific person, you notice that they have some behavioral quirk that irks you. Over time, you feel more and more irked by this quirk. (Hrmm.. irk, quirk, maybe I need different words...), to the point where you avoid interacting with this person due to their irksome quirk.

I am semi-assuming that the mechanism involves an increase in conscious or subliminal attention to the offending perception, thus creating a sensation of increased salience of the stimulus. But...I don't want to assume too far, and I'm curious if the subject has been formally explored.

# Answer
There is a model of neural mechanisms of accumulation and triggering in the domain of perceptual choice called the leaky competing accumulator (Usher and McClelland, 2001) model. It uses *decision units* that fire when sufficient evidence has accumulated. Ratcliff and McKoon (2008) pointed out that LCA associated with their Diffusion model accurately modeled the neural firing rates observed in monkeys before a decision was made (see section 10 of the article, a monkey moving his eyes to a target that competed with a non-target stimulus).

The processes described in LCA are also found in different theoretical account of decision making. You may find some models in this wikipedia page summarizing the decision field theory of Busemeyer & Townsend (1993).

Your question mentioned a longer time scale than the one addressed by the above references. I don't know a model of accumulation/decisions that span over hours/days/years. For example, the one here, despite its promising title ('From perception to action: an economic model of brain processes'), is not interested in the temporal aspect of the decision (i.e. accumulation phase).
> 6 votes

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Tags: perception, emotion, cognitive-neuroscience
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# Question
Title: How to restore and maintain a healthy sleep pattern?
**Background:** Some people over holiday periods or weekends get into sleep patterns that involve waking up very late in the day (e.g., 1pm), and then going to bed quite late (e.g.,, 4am). Such people can find it very difficult to bring back their sleep pattern to be in line with more regular day time rhythms (i.e., waking up between 6am and 10am). When earlier wake-up is attempted, this can result in feelings of fatigue and low mood. Such attempts can even fail, when the person sleeps through the alarm clock.

**General questions:**

* How can a sleep pattern be effectively re-aligned with normal day time rhythms?
* What are effective strategies for maintaining a regular sleep pattern?
* Is there any specific research on what strategies work best?

# Answer
Yang et al. (2001) study this exact question. They administered 6 mg of melatonin on Sunday afternoon to subjects that had delayed sleep-wake schedules for the two prior days. They found that

> On Sunday, melatonin administration increased the sleepiness throughout the evening and reduced sleep onset latency at bedtime. On Monday morning, subjective sleepiness was decreased in the melatonin condition.

Kolla & Auger (2011) deal with resetting the internal clock for jetlag and night shift workers. Even though the situation is not identical, I think their main recommendations for adjusting the internal clock are relevant:

> Exposure to bright light in the hours leading up to the patient’s minimum core body temperature tends to push the internal clock later in time, whereas bright light in the hours immediately afterward pushes the clock earlier in time.

(minimum core body temperature is usually 2-3 hours before wakeup time). So in other words, in order to re-align from wakeup at 1pm to 6-10am one should wake up as early as possible, and go out to be exposed to sunlight (or use an artificial light source).

They also discuss the use of drugs such as melatonin and caffeine.

**References**

* Yang, C. M., Spielman, A. J., D Ambrosio, P., Serizawa, S., Nunes, J., & Birnbaum, J. (2001). A single dose of melatonin prevents the phase delay associated with a delayed weekend sleep pattern. Sleep, 24(3), 272-281. Full text PDF
* Kolla, B. P., & Auger, R. R. (2011). Jet lag and shift work sleep disorders: How to help reset the internal clock. Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine, 78(10), 675-684. Full text.
> 3 votes

# Answer
(1) Re-aligning sleep pattern

In addition to Ofri Raviv's answer (get sunlight), I would like to stress that the only way to re-align your sleep pattern is to get up at the time you want to get up, and keep getting up for as long as it takes for your pattern to re-align, no matter how tired you are. Because, as soon as you give in and sleep longer, you re-inforce the "late" pattern you want to overcome. You will be tired for a day or two, because you didn't manage to get to bed in time, but this tiredness will enable you to go to bed earlier on the following evenings. All you have to do it go to bed when you feel sleepy.

Tiredness is a great help in building a new sleep routine, and sleep restriction (so you are tired enough to actually sleep) is a regular part in many behavioral therapies of sleep disorder. Because one fundamental problem in sleep disorders is that people spend to much sleepless time in bed, causing them to want to sleep in in the morning. When you go to bed, you want to be tired enough to fall asleep immediately, so that you get at least five hours of undisturbed sleep. But always keep your wake-up time, and work at the go-to-bed time end of your sleep cycle.

Also, avoid computer and television monitors in the evening, because they have the same effect as sunlight and will tell your body that it is still day and you should be active. So, get sun (and computer screens) in the morning, as Ofri Raviv wrote, and avoid them in the afternoon and especially evening. Sleep with the blinds open, so the morning sunlight helps wake you. An open window and fresh air will also help you feel less groggy in the morning.

(2) Maintaining a regular sleep pattern

The answer is already given in the question. As simple and tautological as it may seem, a regular sleep pattern can best be maintained by maintaining a regular sleep pattern. Behavioral therapy for children and adults with sleep disorders includes one fundamental rule, which is to go to sleep and wake up at the same time every day. No surprises there.

So, the best idea would be to not party so late that you need to sleep more than two or three hours longer than regular, and not for more than one night per week. If you need to party, you better don't go to bed at all or get up at your regular time, no matter how short your sleep was, and got to bed at your regular time (or a bit earlier) on the following evening. This will minimize the disruption. The important part is that you get up regularly on the next day.

Source:

Witnessing sleep therapies in our local psychotherapeutic day clinic.

Short introduction to behavioral sleep therapy at Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive\_behavioral\_therapy\_for\_insomnia
> 2 votes

# Answer
I've read that avoiding eating for 12+ hours and then eating breakfast helps reset your sleep pattern to wake up before that breakfast on subsequent days. I tried tat, and it seems to help
> 0 votes

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Tags: sleep, well-being
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title: Coping with Asperger's in the workplace

text:
# Question
Title: Coping with Asperger's in the workplace
People with Asperger's Syndrome (AS) are often highly intelligent and are capable to complete their studies and do well in jobs where they can operate solo. Adding a person with AS to a team can cause considerable stress at the workfloor which may be justified by the extraordinary skills of the employee with AS.

Are there any strategies for teams (or individuals) to cope with, learn to utilize, their team member with AS?

# Answer
I work with people who have Asperger's Syndrome every day and have had no major problems at all. The reason is that I do indeed follow some documented strategies, particularly those outlined in "Working with a Person with Asperger’s Syndrome" (Autism Victoria, 2007). A brief list of strategies suggested by that document suggest that workers with Asperger's Syndrome need:

* consistency 
* predictability
* a calm and controlled supervisor (this also applies to coworkers)
* an organised workplace

Most of all, don't make a big deal of their condition, just be aware of what is needed.
> 5 votes

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Tags: io-psychology, aspergers
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# Question
Title: What research has been done on attachment types in other primates?
The most canonical experimental paradigm for studying human attachment styles is the Strange Situation leading to classifications such as Secure, Insecure-avoidant, and so on.

**What are the equivalent methodologies, classifications, findings and longtitudinal variability in studies of other primates?**

I should add that I'm vaguely aware of, say, Harlow's work, but as far as I understand it, it seems to be about the existence of, rather than the variability of, attachment behaviour in animals.

# Answer
> 1 votes
Jaak Panksepp, in Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions, describes seven brain systems, "raw feels", that are shared among human and non-human primates. One of these systems is PANIC (he capitalizes the systems' name to differentiate them from the similar terms used in speaking about emotions). He says, "a separation distress PANIC system is important in the elaboration of social-emotional processes related to attachment".

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Tags: social-psychology, developmental-psychology, animal-cognition
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# Question
Title: What are the neurological differences between those who have a high tolerance to pain and those who do not?
I am curious to learn what are the neurological differences between those that have a high tolerance to pain than to those that do not. Specifically, by high tolerance to pain, I am referring to those people who can just 'work through' any moderate and even severe injury (e.g. a broken arm - as I have seen a couple of people do).

# Answer
> 11 votes
Much of the "higher order" sensation of pain is processed in the anterior cingulate cortex.

From Wikimedia Commons

There is a movement towards performing anterior cingulotomies in patients with intractable pain. These procedures are also used to help patients with severe depression or obsessive compulsive disorder, so we have some idea that this area of the brain is a point at which emotional salience is associated with our experience of the world around us. In the case of pain, post-surgical patients still experience all of the "lower level" symptoms (prostaglandin synthesis, etc.), but do not attach any meaning to them.

So, it is likely that individual differences in this anatomical region could partially account for those who can "work through" the pain versus those for whom it becomes overwhelming. It's certainly possible that those who can tolerate pain have a lower sensitivity to prostaglandins in their spinal circuitry, but I can't speak to whether that's a valid explanation.

> Yen CP, Kuan CY, Sheehan J, Kung SS, Wang CC, Liu CK, Kwan AL (2009) Impact of bilateral anterior cingulotomy on neurocognitive function in patients with intractable pain. J Clin Neurosci., 16(2), 214-9.

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Tags: neuroscience, pain
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title: Minimizing Halo Error

text:
# Question
Title: Minimizing Halo Error
I'm working with a dataset wherein participants rate five different attributes of six device variants; the attribute ratings different variants are very tightly correlated, suggesting that this dataset has a problem with halo error--participants form an overall impression of the quality of the device, and then instead of reassessing the device for each attribute, they answer each attribute with their overall evaluation of the device.

What strategies are used to combat this effect, either before execution in the design of the study or after execution in the analysis? **Citations for evidence for any strategies particularly desired.**

# Answer
Murphy & Cleveland (1995) mention, that a good way to reduce rater errors in general is to inform raters of the existence and nature of these errors and then to simply urge to avoid them. While this reduces rater errors, it also decreases the accuracy of ratings, though. These findings come from the literature on performance assessment, where halo is usually thought of as the opposite of accuracy. The unexpected association has been termed the *halo-accuracy-paradox*

Some authors have proposed that the paradoxical effect is due to different operational definitions of halo (Fisicaro, 1988). Apparently there is some evidence that the paradoxcal effect vanishes when this problem is taken care of.

An interesting explanation comes from Latham (Woehr & Huffut, 1994). For him it's all in the way that raters are informed about halo. If raters are told that halo is a global tendency across different ratings and that it is a bad thing, then raters are going to avoid exactly that. But that does not make the ratings more accurate. So when training raters one has to be careful not to create this kind if effect.

In contrast, a meta-analysis by Woehr & Huffcut (1994) that investigates the effectiveness of different kinds of rater trainings does not find the paradoxical effect. Instead, rater trainings moderately decreases halo and increases accuracy. The authors also found support for Latham's hypothesis. The mean effect size when rater training was in accordance with his view was bigger compared to the other cases.

Still, Murphy and Cleveland (1995) are quite radical in their proposal. To them, there are serious problems with all operational definitions of halo (and rater errors in general). Therefore measurements of rater errors should be abandoned altogether. Hence, in their view it doesn't make sense to speak of a paradox.

References:
<sub> Fisicaro, S. A. (1988). A reexamination of the relation between halo error and accuracy. *Journal of Applied Psychology.* 73(2), 239.
Murphy, K. R. & Cleveland, J.N. (1995). *Understanding performance appraisal: Social, organizational, and goal-based perspectives.* Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Woehr, D. J., & Huffcutt, A. I. (1994). Rater training for performance appraisal: A quantitative review. *Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology*, 67(3), 189-205. </sub>
> 5 votes

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Tags: methodology, statistics, bias, survey, halo-effect
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# Question
Title: Correct measure of central tendency for reaction times analysis
I'd like to know what would be the less biased measure of central tendency to compare RTs in two conditions with a lot of trials (~700). Mean is really sensitive to outliers, and median really robust, so I always used this last one. However it seems to me that I'm not really catching what's happening on the tail of the distribution with this measure. I'm not familiar with diffusion model though.

# Answer
You can find an accessible overview of some of the issues in Whelan (2008) which contains further references discussing the issue. Note that from a statistical perspective, the sample mean and median are unbiased estimators of their population equivalents. That said, with outliers, skew and the like, the standard error of the sample mean can be quite a bit larger than the sample median. Furthermore, you typically the population distribution should be seen as a multiple component mixture distribution (e.g., fast guess trials, "real trials", distracted trials). In such cases, you may be particularly interested in the central tendency of the "real trial" distribution. In that case, sample mean and median may be biased estimates of "real trial" equivalent population distributions.

Whelan (2008) suggests the following in order of preference when estimating a measure of central tendency:

1. Mean after trimming the raw data for outliers (i.e., taking the middle 85% to 95% of RT data)
2. Mean of log or negative inverse transformation of raw reaction time
3. Median of raw RT

That said, the justification for a given method depends on the underlying distribution of the data and the nature of the effect of condition. For example, if condition is mainly influencing prevalence of outliers or skew, this will effect the mean more than the median in the population.

A good general strategy for exploring these issues and justifying your decision is to estimate central tendency in reaction times using a range of methods. Then correlate the scores you get for each individual using the different methods. If you are getting very high correlations (e.g., r\>.95 or .99) then you will know that the method makes little difference.

Whelan (2008) also discusses strategies for estimating all parameters in the RT distribution.

If you are studying choice reaction time, then LBA or Ratcliff's diffusion model may be more appropriate.

### References

* Whelan, R. (2008). Effective analysis of reaction time data. The Psychological Record, 58, 475-482. PDF
> 8 votes

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Tags: statistics, reaction-time
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# Question
Title: What are the mechanics behind the mind of a conspiracy theorist?
Conspiracy Theorists, in *my* opinion, are people I don't like except for some exceptions. However, this question will not be answered with my irrelevant opinions on said people..

Now, here is the question:

* Why do conspiracy theorists become conspiracy theorists?
* Why do they get the ideas that they do?
* Are they looking for attention?
* What are the mechanics behind their minds/thought process?

Some conspiracies:

* "Tupac is still alive, he will come back in year 20(12,13,14)"
* "The New World Order is going to take over the world."

Do these people warp things like the Illuminati into a conspiracy? What is behind the minds of these people? Is there any prevalence of mental (conditions, disease) among them? Is there any different type of parenting or environment they are raised in?

All of these questions don't need to be answered, but those are the questions running through my mind.

# Answer
> 7 votes
Interesting question, I am glad that you stated that it is not going to be opinion-based (grounds for closure), as there is some research being done in this field.

A couple papers and details of their research for you:

"Social Psychological Origins of Conspiracy Theories: The Case of the Jewish Conspiracy Theory in Malaysia" (Swami, 2012) states that in some cases, such as the case study presented in the title of this article, it is a 'state-based' conspiracy theory, where:

> in which state-directed conspiracism as a means of dealing with **perceived** external and internal threats

(emphasis mine).

This could also be extended to why individuals take on the conspiracy theories themselves.

This, in a way relates to the next article:

"The Sarrazin effect: the presence of absurd statements in conspiracy theories makes canonical information less plausible" (Raab et al. 2013), which is best summed up in one of their concluding paragraphs:

> It is these dynamics of reception, alteration and propagation that account for the many-faceted phenomenon we call conspiracy theory. The cognitive effort, i.e., considering information in the eventuality space, might be rewarding and satisfying in itself; just like an aesthetic experience or a mental exercise (cf. Muth & Carbon, 2013). Unlike a crossword puzzle, however, reception and propagation of a conspiracy theory allow for intercommunion. Yet, as many participants reported afterwards, constructing a story can ultimately be fun.

Essentially, it is almost like the first example, where the state propagates a conspiracy theory to try to comprehend and cope with perceived threats, the same can apply to the individual.

I hope this helps.

# Answer
> 0 votes
In my opinion the main reason of conspiracy theory is lack of information. As in rumors. In this wikipedia page you can find a lot of research on rumors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumor. When people dont have enough information they tend to confabulate because of Gestalt princioles.

But also there is quality of conspiracy theory and amount of truth, not all conspiraci theories are bogus.

# Answer
> -3 votes
If you are looking for an insight into the mind of a conspiracy theorist, there was a very long "suicide note" printed by some guy who successfully committed suicide.Wikipedia says this is the longest note, but it does not seem like the right one I cannot find it now, but remember that it was about 1000 pages long.

naturally, I cannot read a 1000 pages, so I wrote a perl script that pulled the most used words within that note. Most of these were very negative, but what struck me as odd is that many world war 2 related terms were up there, like nazis, Jews, etc. **I got a feeling that his mind was going in circles around those topics and could not escape.**

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Tags: experimental-psychology, abnormal-psychology, psychiatry
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# Question
Title: Skin conductance responses to emotional stimuli
The skin conductance response (SCR) is said that cannot be reduced to one specific stimulus (Boucsein, 2012). Does this mean that if the participant is presented with stimuli of different emotional content, separated by pause, there would be no specific response to the emotional stimuli?

References Boucsein, W. (2012). Electrodermal activity: Springer.

# Answer
The article *Autonomic nervous system activity in emotion: A review* seems to answer your question.

You will find in Table 2 the average electrodermal effect (unweighted) found in 134 studies for different emotions. I see in the Skin Conductance Response (SCR) row that all the 11 emotions under study produced an increase in activation from baseline, except for 'sadness acute' (decrease) and 'contentment' (identical). This is the level of differentiation in emotional states you will find with this particular measure.

Given that Table 2 is an average, you may find some stronger variations across emotional states in a particular experiment. Table A1 gives a list of the articles that measured SCR.
> 7 votes

# Answer
Electrodermal activity is an index of sympathetic activation and a skin conductance response can occur in many situations. It is therefore a very general response and can arise as a result of stimulus novelty or “significance” (whether you want to call this an affective response is up to you but it seems very different from common sense notions of what an emotion is).

You can however measure phasic responses specific to a stimulus in the sense that even a single presentation can be followed by a skin conductance “spike”. The shape of the response will however not be specific to a class of stimulus or narrowly defined content (there is no obvious characteristic “fear” or “happiness” signature, no “audio” or “visual” skin conductance response).

There are some attempts to discriminate positive from negative emotions based on skin conductance and also quite a lot of research using machine learning techniques to classify emotional responses based on physiological measurement but usually not on a single signal, and without much success for electrodermal activity alone.

Skin conductance is often interpreted as some sort of physiological arousal but that's a notion Wolfram Boucsein would probably have considered too simplistic. I don't think you need to over-analyze a single sentence to find an answer to your question, it should be quite clear from the whole book and, implicitly, from the fact that Boucsein did not discuss patterns of skin conductance responses associated with discrete emotions (which he would have if well-established results on this existed).

If you dig into the psycholophysiological literature, you will find that sophisticated approaches try to disentangle the activation of various part of the autonomic nervous system and deal with things like the defense or orientation response, preparedness to conditioning, fight-or-flight, etc. None of this maps neatly to subjective/expressive emotion categories like “fear” or “anger”.

Regarding the Q-Sensor, I have never actually used it but I have read a few papers and seen work from Rosalind Picard's lab at conferences and the like and I was under the impression that a big part of this research was concerned with skin conductance *level*, not *responses* (i.e. tonic responses, things like being relaxed or excited by an activity over a period of several minutes, but not phasic responses to a single picture or audio clip). If you follow Boucsein, it's not even clear you could get a clean measure of phasic responses with a sensor that's not firmly attached to the body on one of the spots with many sweat glands (palm of the hand or foot).

Some other references:

* Cacioppo, J. T., Klein, D. J., Berntson, G. G., & Hatfield, E. (1993). The Psychophysiology of Emotion. In M. Lewis & J. M. Haviland (Eds.) *Handbook of Emotions* (pp. 119-142). New York: The Guilford Press.

There is a chapter on the topic in every edition of the *Handbook* with a slightly different constellation of authors each time but I don't have the references at hand. The one from the second edition (2000) contains a meta-analysis of studies on the discrimination between discrete emotions through physiology.
* Dawson, M. E., Schell, A. M., & Filion, D. L. (1990). The Electrodermal System. In J. T. Cacioppo, L. G. Tassinary (Eds.) Principles of psychophysiology: Physical, social, and inferential elements (pp. 295-324). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Again, the chapter has been updated in later editions of the book (published under the title *Handbook of psychophysiology* starting with the second edition) and is worth checking out.
> 8 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, measurement, emotion, physiology, cognitive-neuroscience
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# Question
Title: Why do individuals initially dislike things that they end up ultimately liking?
**Background:** I noticed with a lot of things, but especially music I tend to hate certain songs and albums initially but they always seem to grow on me, and vice versa. I noticed this pattern in a lot of my friends as well so my question is:

**Why do humans dislike things they normally like later on?**

# Answer
> 3 votes
It could be the case that it takes time to like some thinks. We get habituated by being exposed to the same stimuli, here music. The dislike decreases after repeated presentations and the likeness may occur, if at all. At the same time, there is a continuous 'strive' between 'familiarity' and 'change'. The experience of 'change' we face by listening to some songs at the beginning, might become the experience of 'familiar' sounds and the liking could develop. The same experience I've had with some food preparations.

# Answer
> 2 votes
One relevant piece of research is the research on the “mere exposure” effect. Basically, the idea is that being exposed to something novel is enough to make you like it a little bit more. The most common interpretation is that we generally like the things we can understand/process easily and that repeated exposures makes the stimulus more familiar and thus easier to process. This goes under the name “processing fluency”.

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, emotion, music, aesthetics
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# Question
Title: Psychological journal that focuses on publishing interesting psychological datasets
There are a range of data repositories around. There are also journals that permit online attachments. That said, my general experience with such online attachments is that the data sharing is an after thought. It is not optimised for accessibility. The information is often not sufficient to truly understand the data.

I'd like to see a journal that specialises in publishing interesting psychological datasets. Such a journal would ensure that the dataset was well documented. It would have clear, machine-readable meta-data. Scripts for processing raw data might be provided.

**Are there any psychological journals that specialise in publishing psychological datasets?**

# Answer
**Scientific Data**: After asking my question, I did a quick search and found one promising journal that will commence in 2014 called *Scientific Data*.

> Scientific Data is a new open-access, online-only publication for descriptions of scientifically valuable datasets. It introduces a new type of content called the Data Descriptor, which will combine traditional narrative content with curated, structured descriptions of research data, including detailed methods and technical analyses supporting data quality. Scientific Data will initially focus on the life, biomedical and environmental science communities, but will be open to content from a wide range of scientific disciplines. Publications will be complementary to both traditional research journals and data repositories, and will be designed to foster data sharing and reuse, and ultimately to accelerate scientific discovery.
>
> Scientific Data will launch in Spring 2014 and be open for submissions in Autumn 2013. Sign up for our e-mail alerts or follow us to stay informed.
>
> Scientific Data will be open to submissions from a broad range of scientific disciplines, ...\[including\] Behavioural data – psychology or neuroscience studies

**Archives of Scientific Psychology**: This is a new open access journal from the APA. It requires that raw data be made available in a suitable repository. However, publication of data is not the main purpose of the journal. Also, the journal appears to mandate that data only be available once a a request form has been submitted and approved.

> The authors have made available the data that underlie the analyses presented in the article. The data can be used by others for verification or extension of the study’s results. The data are **available from APA or another approved repository upon agreement regarding usage**. If deposited with APA, next users agree to offer to the researchers who generated the data involvement in any subsequent publications
> 5 votes

# Answer
The Journal of Open Psychology Data:

A great project spearheaded by Jelte M. Wicherts, longtime open science advocate.

Unfortunately, it has only published one paper so far.
> 5 votes

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Tags: data, reproducible-research, publication-process
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title: Information sampling task

text:
# Question
Title: Information sampling task
There is a lot of research done on impulsivity trait. Here is detailed wikipedia article and here is one interestiing video of biological and psychosocial causes of impulsivity.

In wikipedia article lot of tests are mentioned, but I am specificaly looking for:

> Information sampling task. Onsly aditional information I have is authors Clark et al, 2006.

It measure reflection against impulsivity.

Does anyone knows where to find it or how to use it or is there any substitute for that test.

# Answer
The researchers that developed this task decribe it in DeVito et al. (2009) as follows:

> **Information Sampling Task**
>
> The IST (Clark et al. 2006) is a measure of ‘reflection– impulsivity’. Subjects were told they would be presented with ten trials in each of two conditions \[fixed win (FW), decreasing win (DW)\] and that the task would last for 10 min. On each trial, a 5×5 matrix of grey boxes with two larger coloured panels below it was presented. Subjects were told to press on a box to reveal its colour and to open as many boxes as they chose prior to deciding which of the two colours they thought was in the majority amongst the 25 boxes. Boxes remain open for the duration of the trial to minimise working memory load. To register their decision, they pressed on one of the two coloured panels displayed. In the FW condition, if the subject chose correctly, they earned 100 points, but lost 100 points if they chose incorrectly. In the DW condition, subjects begin with the ability to win 250 points, but with every box they opened the amount they could win decreased by 10 points. An incorrect choice was still penalised with a loss of 100 points regardless of the amount of boxes opened. Therefore, in the FW condition, extensive information sampling prior to decision was optimal, whilst in order to gain points in the DW condition the subject must adjust to sample less information. A variable inter-trial interval was used such that the minimum trial duration was 30 s (e.g. if the subject responded after 10 s, the inter-trial interval would be 20 s). This feature was included to prevent unduly rapid responses leading to shorter task duration and thus an earlier escape of the experimental setting. This task is described in more detail by Clark et al. (2006).

In Clark et al. (2006), they write:

> In the present study, we used a novel Information Sampling Task (IST) to assess reflection impulsivity in chronic substance users. The objectives of the IST design were to derive a primary index of information sampling (rather than a speed–accuracy composite) in a task that placed negligible demands on visual processing and working memory. The IST presents a series of trials with an array of 25 grey boxes arranged in a 5 × 5 matrix. The grey boxes conceal an underlying assortment of squares (e.g., yellow and blue; Figure 1) on each trial. The subject was asked to decide which of the two underlying colors (yellow or blue) lay in the majority. The subject was able to open as many boxes as they wished to make that decision. Once opened, boxes remained visible for the duration of the trial to obviate working memory demands. Correct decisions were awarded a number of points, with trials blocked into two conditions. In the Fixed Win (FW) condition, a correct decision yielded 100 points, irrespective of the number of boxes opened. In the Decreasing Win (DW) condition, the number of available points decreased with every box opened. Consequently, the DW condition introduced a conflict between reinforcement and certainty: to maximize reinforcement the subject must tolerate high uncertainty, whereas sampling information until a point of high certainty would win very few points. Given preliminary evidence that drug users might be hypersensitive to reward (Bechara et al 2002 and Garavan and Stout 2005), we predicted that the DW condition would encourage impulsive responding and exaggerate individual differences.

> Figure 1. Screen display for the Information Sampling Task. Each trial commences (left) with the presentation of 25 grey boxes arranged in a 5 × 5 matrix, covering a random assortment of two colors of squares; these two colors are displayed on panels at the foot of the screen. When the subject touches a box (middle), it opens to reveal its color. The subject must decide which of the two colors lies in the majority on the board. They are told they can open as many boxes as they wish to make this decision. They are told to touch the corresponding panel at the foot of the screen (bottom right) once they have decided which color is in the majority.

In addition, there is a description of the Information Sampling Task in the Cognitive Atlas.

**References**

* DeVito, E. E., Blackwell, A. D., Clark, L., Kent, L., Dezsery, A. M., Turner, D. C., ... & Sahakian, B. J. (2009). Methylphenidate improves response inhibition but not reflection–impulsivity in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Psychopharmacology, 202(1-3), 531-539.
* Clark, L., Robbins, T. W., Ersche, K. D., & Sahakian, B. J. (2006). Reflection impulsivity in current and former substance users. Biological psychiatry, 60(5), 515-522.
> 8 votes

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Tags: measurement, cognitive-neuroscience
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# Question
Title: Online data repository of research in the cognitive sciences
Sharing data is an important part of science (e.g., see APA discussion). It's also often useful to be able to have access to datasets when teaching students how to analyse data in the cognitive sciences.

* What online data repositories for research are available in the cognitive sciences (e.g., psychology, psychiatry, cognitive science, etc.)?

Ideally, it would be good to include:

* a link to the repository
* an overview of the size of the repository
* the disciplinary content of the repository
* whether there are restrictions on access and use

# Answer
The ADNI project (2004–ongoing) aims at characterizing change in cognitive functions and brain structures with age, with a particular emphasis on Alzheimer's disease and neuroimaging.

From the website,

> The overall goal of this huge project is to define the rate of progress of mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease, to develop improved methods for clinical trials in this area, and to provide a large database which will improve design of treatment trials. We expect that this project will provide information and methods which will help lead to effective treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, leading to effective prevention.

Data that are collected include: demographics, clinical data, neuroimaging (MRI/PET) data, and a wide range of cognitive tests. (More on ADCS website.) Details about protocols, available data can be found under ADNI Scientist's Home. In particular, data are available on ADCS. Please note that you must write an application to get the data (as is often the case).
> 12 votes

# Answer
The PROMIS project (funded by NIH) built upon a large scale US epidemiological study to assess patient-reported chronic disease outcomes. Data were collected on general population and multiple disease populations in different centers.

From the website,

> Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) is a system of highly reliable, precise measures of patient–reported health status for physical, mental, and social well–being. PROMIS tools measure what patients are able to do and how they feel by asking questions. PROMIS’ measures can be used as primary or secondary endpoints in clinical studies of the effectiveness of treatment.

Its penultimate goal is to build a calibrated and cross-cultural item bank to assess patient reported outcomes (in particular, disease-specific quality of life, mental health, social relationships and personality traits), for adults and children. The main domains that are covered are described in the Domain Framework. Data are publicly released, but you have to write a short application to access them.
> 10 votes

# Answer
The Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) provides 8000+ data sets. Topics include aging, criminal justice, education, or health.

As an example, here is my favorite, the summary of the "500 Family Study". This study includes questionnaire, cortisol, and experience sampling data:

> The 500 Family Study was designed to obtain in-depth information on middle class, dual-career families living in the United States. To understand the complex dynamics of today's families and the strategies they use to balance the demands of work and family, over 500 families from 8 cities across the United States were studied. To address different issues facing parents with older and younger children, families with adolescents and families with kindergartners were included in the sample. Working mothers and fathers are now splitting their time between their responsibilities to their family, and to their respective occupations. This study of 500 families explores how work affects the lives and well-being of parents and their children.
> 9 votes

# Answer
The **IQSS Dataverse Network** looks good.

From the website:

> Access the world's largest collection of social science research data here by searching across or browsing through one of the virtual data archives (called "dataverses") listed below. You may also create a dataverse of your own, backed up in perpetuity by the Henry A. Murray Archive, which may easily be customized to appear as if it is on your web page, but in fact is served by the IQSS Dataverse Network. This means that all the scholarly credit, web visibility, and access control for the data devolve to you, but all the work, preservation guarantees, and software and hardware upgrades and maintenance are taken care of by IQSS.

At time of posting it lists `Dataverses: 390 | Studies: 42,018 | Files: 674,076`
> 5 votes

# Answer
It is not specifically for data from the cognitive sciences but figshare might be worth looking at:

> figshare allows researchers to publish all of their research outputs in seconds in an easily citable, sharable and discoverable manner. All file formats can be published, including videos and datasets that are often demoted to the supplemental materials section in current publishing models. By opening up the peer review process, researchers can easily publish null results, avoiding the file drawer effect and helping to make scientific research more efficient. figshare uses creative commons licensing to allow frictionless sharing of research data whilst allowing users to maintain their ownership.
>
> figshare gives users unlimited public space and 1GB of private storage space for free.

(There is more information at their FAQ)

As of now (August 24th, 2012) there is only one data set that is filed under psychology (from an article by Wicherts & Bakker, 2012) but there are several more in the social sciences. Maybe this interdisciplinary repository will grow some more in the future.
> 5 votes

# Answer
This question asks about Psychological journal that focuses on publishing interesting psychological datasets journals where you can publish psychological data. Such journals rely on other organisations to provide repositories for the published datasets.

In particular, the journal *Open Psychological Data* has a page which lists several data repositories along with an excellent summary of important features of each repository (e.g., location, focus, cost, licences, identifiers, sustainability, and depositing instructions). In case the link goes down, hear is summary of listed repositories:
> 4 votes

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Tags: data, reproducible-research
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# Question
Title: How should multiple Mechanical Turk research subjects from the same IP address be handled?
*I saw this question on Twitter from Jay Van Bavel (@jayvanbavel), and thought it was a good fit for the site.*

> Does anyone find that multiple subjects from the same IP address in their #MTurk data? How do you deal with this issue? Citations welcome.

Thus, to rephrase:

* What does it mean when you get two or more Mechanical Turk participants in a study with the same IP address?
* What is a general strategy for dealing with such cases?
* Are there are any references discussing the issue?

# Answer
Since this is a relatively new problem for behavioral researchers, I don't know that there is a common consensus. I found two articles, one of which was a study that had used crowdsourcing for medical pictograms.

Their approach was as follows:

> First, we checked for duplicate records. After sorting the data by participants’ IP addresses, we found three pairs of responses with the same IP address. In two pairs, the pictogram interpretations and the demographic survey answers were nearly identical, but the participation dates were different. We counted them as duplicate records and kept only the first record of each on file.

From:

> Yu B, Willis M, Sun P, Wang J (2013) Crowdsourcing Participatory Evaluation of Medical Pictograms Using Amazon Mechanical Turk J Med Internet Res, 15(6):e108 \[FREE\] \[DOI\]

In an article just posted this month, the subject is dealt with in more general terms, and some statistics are offered as to how frequently this might occur, and some of the reasons behind it.

> Although workers may be able to have more than one concurrent MTurk account and, thus, more than one WorkerID, this is uncommon. Amazon actively works to identify and eliminate duplicate accounts. More important, requesters often restrict lucrative HITs to workers who have completed a large volume of high-quality work in the past

So, it seems that WorkerID can be used as a unique identifier and Amazon does actually screen for duplicate accounts, eliminating some of the risk of duplicate responders to the same study.

In terms of IP addresses, the article offers some idea of the extent of the problem:

> Examinations of worker IP addresses typically reveal a small minority of workers (around 2.5 %; Berinsky et al.,2012\**) who submit HITs from the same IP address, which may often result from workers being separate members of a single household.

From:

> Chandler, J, Mueller, P, Paolacci, G (2013). Nonnaïveté among Amazon Mechanical Turk workers: Consequences and solutions for behavioral researchers. Behavior Research Methods, published online 9 July 2013 \[DOI\]

The first article pointed out the fact that dropping data from a study based upon duplicate IP addresses can be done without much of a cost penalty.

Other demographic factors can be used to discern whether these are different people, but the accuracy of these answers is not guaranteed, but can be bolstered by having dependencies between demographic categories (e.g., recording gender and last menstrual period should be consistent).

Results should be checked more carefully for users that share the same IP address, as even if they are different members of a household, they may be sharing a set of answers, but it seems like there is a low cost to including data from those with matching IP addresses.

<sup> \** The citation for the Berinsky paper included in the Chandler 2013 work is as follows: Berinsky, A. J., Huber, G. A., & Lenz, G. S. (2012). Evaluating online labor markets for experimental research: Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk. Political Analysis, 20(3), 351–368. \[DOI\] I did not examine this work</sup>
> 4 votes

# Answer
I'll address just the first of your three sub-questions, the others have been answered by Chuck Sherrington.

* What does it mean when you get two or more Mechanical Turk participants in a study with the same IP address?

IP addresses are rarely "fixed" to an individual computer. Each provider has a range of IP addresses available and assigns them to computers as they connect to the network. Every time you boot your computer, every time you connect to a WLAN network, you'll probably have a different IP address. Try it with a tool such as http://whatismyipaddress.com

So of course the IP address you had yesterday will be assigned to someone else tomorrow. It only means that both computers were connected through the same provider. No other conclusions can be drawn from the IP address!

(Only the combination of IP address and connection time is unique to your computer. Your provider stores your connection data for a legally specified period, and during this time the police will be able to identify your computer if they know the time of the connection, but this data is not publicly available.)

Usually IP addresses remain stable through a session, but you cannot even rely on that. DSL connections are often reset once every 24 hours, so if you are online at night, you might experience a loss of your network connection, and after that you'll very likely have a different IP. Mobile connections are separated much more often, and your IP address will change as often. So, if you save a user's IP address at the beginning of a survey and again at the end, both might differ! This will be especially true for users surfing through anonymisation tools such as a TOR network which are programmed to switch IP addresses regularly.

You cannot reliably identify a single computer through an IP address. Use cookies for that or rely on user specified data.

---

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP\_address#IP\_address\_assignment
> 5 votes

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Tags: methodology, internet, mechanical-turk
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# Question
Title: Are imprinting and computer literacy connected?
I've recently became aware of the phenomenon of imprinting, in which baby animals start to associate with the first moving object with eyes that they see during a **critical period** of their infancy.

What interested me is that at the end of the imprinting article there is a snippet on the "baby duck syndrome" for humans:

> In human–computer interaction, baby duck syndrome denotes **the tendency for computer users to "imprint" on the first system they learn**, then judge other systems by their similarity to that first system.\[9\] The result is that "users generally prefer systems similar to those they learned on and dislike unfamiliar systems."\[10\] The issue may present itself relatively early in a computer user's experience, and has been observed to impede education of students in new software systems.\[11\]

**I'm interested if imprinting affects our ability to interact with computers, and if there is a "critical period" for learning computers.**

For example, I repeatedly observed people in their 50s and above, who have not had any exposure to computers until their late 40s, fail to figure out how to operate a computer. A typical example is a bewildered user who has 2 monitors connected and is unable to comprehend or recall that a file can open on a monitor that is turned off, but is connected by cable. A "digital native" would be able to identify such issue in seconds. **Is imprinting causing the difference between the experience of these two groups?**

# Answer
> 5 votes
The answer is no. Definition of imprinting is:

A rapid learning process by which a newborn or very young animal establishes a behavior pattern of recognition and attraction towards other animals of its own kind, as well as to specific individuals of its species, such as its parents, or to a substitute for these. Ducklings, for example, will imprint upon and follow the first large moving object they observe. In nature, this is usually their mother, but they can be made to imprint upon other moving objects, such as a soccer ball.

Imprinting is not connected to learning social skills but attachment. Also the problem of learning of computing is matter of fluid, crystalized inteligence and anxiety are better predictors:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1524856/

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Tags: learning, developmental-psychology, human-factors
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# Question
Title: What do id, ego and super-ego exactly mean?
I don't know much about psychology, but I've heard about Sigmund Freud's structural model of the psyche, with the three part of the psychic apparatus. However, I couldn't really understand the parts.

As far as I could understand it: the ego is the "everyday part" of self: our behaviour, personality and style we use in everyday events and interaction between other people. With this logic, the super-ego is just an "ideal"; a human model that we follow either if we want it or don't - and it often, since it depends on our wants, experiences, aims and fears. But id is something constant, that never changes, and contains our deepest feelings: fear, love, and instincts. Maybe even some hidden knowledges.

So overall: ego is *what we are*, id is *what we ACTUALLY are*, and super ego is that *what we want to be*.

* **Am I right? Or is it more complex?**
* **What exactly is meant by id, ego, and super-ego?**

# Answer
You are pretty much on the money with your description, but here is some further information to help understand the definitions:

Paraphrased from "Freud's Structural and Topographical Models of Personality" (allpsych.com):

The **id** is what we are born with, it is the mechanism that allows our basic needs to be met, and is with us from birth. Essentially, the part of the brain that 'cares' only about it's own satisfaction and needs.

The **ego** meets the needs of the id, while taking into consideration the reality of the situation (e.g. needs of others). According to Freud, this is the strongest part, meeting the needs of the id, while not upsetting the superego.

The **superego** is the moral part of our psyche, that deals with the ethical and moral constraints, i.e. belief in what is right and wrong.

Edited to add: Further and more detailed information can be found included from page 5 in this article from the University of Notre Dame "Id, Ego, and Superego" (Lapsley and Stey).
> 8 votes

# Answer
This is Freud's own original diagram:

Please note that only the uppermost part of the self, the part labelled "pcpt-cs" (i.e. perception-consciousness, German *Wachbewusstsein*) constitutes our conscious thought. All three parts of the psychic apparatus are not conscious. Some parts of the Ego and Super-Ego are preconscious and can potentially become conscious.

The Wikipedia artice on Id, Ego, and Super-Ego explains what they are:

* The Id are your basic instinctual drives.
* The Ego tries to satisfy the needs of the Id according to what is realistically possible.
* The Super-Ego consists of your culture's moral rules as you have internalized them, mainly through the influence of your parents.
> 6 votes

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Tags: cognitive-modeling, psychoanalysis
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# Question
Title: How is age related change in IQ measured if tests use age specific norms?
In a comment to this question about age related IQ decline in professors and scientists, the following comment was left:

> I noticed that lot of IQ tests (RPM or California) have different norms for age groups. So how do they measure decline of IQ. Is it decline of IQ as absolute mental strength? Or drop in numbers measured by specific test? – @ICanFeelIt

I thought I'd phrase it as a specific question here:

**If IQ involves age specific norms, how do researchers study age related changes in IQ?**

See also this earlier question on age related change in IQ.

# Answer
When studying adult IQ, general adult norms are often used. So for example, even if 70 year olds have lower IQ than 20 year olds on average, for research comparison purposes the same adult norms might be used to study age related cognitive differences. Thus, raw-scores and IQ scores will be almost perfectly correlated (except for small adjustments to the distribution resulting form the conversion from raw scores to IQ scores). When studying change in intelligence across childhood, test raw scores can often be used. Of course, things get more challenging studying young children who are unable to complete tests suited to older children and adult.

### Updated comments

* **Cohort and related effects**: I agree with @what's point that assessing whether differences between age groups based on cross-sectional data is problematic. Such differences can be due to cohort effects, death, differential participation rates, and so on. It's much better where possible where possible to study changes in IQ using a longitudinal design where the same participants are studied over extended periods of time. If a cross-sectional design is all that is available then studying the effect of covariates, sampling participants in a thoughtful way, and reasoning about cohort effects are all important.
* **Scaling raw scores to IQ**: @what suggests that you need to relate measurements to a standardisation sample in order to compare research with other studies. First, a distinction can be made between "intelligence" and IQ. IQ is standardised by age. Intelligence is not standardised by age. I am assuming that any studies interested in age related declines in IQ are implicitly actually asking about age related declines in intelligence. That is because by definition at the group level, IQ never changes with age, because age is by definition controlled for. Second, there is an issue of what is a useful metric for describing changes in intelligence with age. I agree that IQ is a familiar metric with a clear mean and standard deviation. For that reason, it is often useful to use this metric with a single adult norm sample to study age related changes. That said, using raw scores would tell the same story regarding age related change; it's just that the metric would be a little less intuitive.
> 4 votes

# Answer
Basically, what you do is you compare each age group IQ to the standardization sample.

According to Kaufman (2005, p. 172), "Parker (1986) had the clever idea of examining the comparative performance of year-of-birth cohorts by equating the standardization samples of the Wechsler-Bellevue I, WAIS, and WAIS-R."

Kaufman describes his procedure for a longitudinal study as follows (p. 172f.):

> The WAIS and WAIS-R standardization samples are quite similar to each other, each matching relevant Census data on numerous key variables. They differ in that the data were collected 25 years apart, in approcimately 1953 and 1978. Thus, several cohorts in the WAIS sample are also represented in the WAIS-R sample. For example, adults born in the 1909-1913 cohort were tested at ages 40-44 in 1953 (on the WAIS), and again at ages 65-69 in 1978 (on the WAIS-R). To the degree that the two samples are comparable, a comparision of the test performance of 40- to 44-year-olds on the WAIS with that of the 65- to 69-year-olds 25 years later on the WAIS-R represents a longitudinal comparison of adults from the same cohort.
>
> Before making the comparisons, he \[Kaufman\] verified empirically that the independent samples were extremely well matched and comparable within each of the four cohorts on the important variables of gender, race ..., geographic region, and educational attainment. Then, he had to convert sums of scaled scores on the WAIS and WAIS-R to a common yardstick to permit age-by-age comparisons, and chose to use the norms for ages 25-34 for all adults in the study. Next, he had to control for the fact that different tests (WAIS vs. WAIS-R) were administered at the two points in time. Conceptually, these two adult scales are interchangeable ..., but because of the "Flynn effect" the WAIS-R yields lower IQs. Kaufman added 6 to 6½ points to each WAIS-R IQ (the median differences from 20 studies totaling over 1.300 subjects) (Kaufman, 1990, Table 3.13) to convert these IQs to WAIS IQs. These "corrections" to the WAIS-R IQs helped answer the crucial question, "How many IQ points higher would adults have scored had they been administered the WAIS instead of the WAIS-R in 1978?" Finally, he applied a time-lag correction to control for cultural change during the 25-year span, just as Owens (1966) did in his Iowa State study. Adjustment for cultural change requires a comparison of the IQs earned by adults of the *same age* in 1978. The 1909-1913 cohort, for example, was 40 to 44 years old n 1953. This group was compared to adults aged 40-44 in 1978 to determine how cultural changes have affected test scores for this age group. Similar time-lag comparisons were conducted for each of the other three cohorts who, in 1953, were ages 20-29, 30-39, and 45-49. The analyses showed that cultural change affected each of the four cohorts about equally, producing about a 3-point IQ gain on the Verbal and Full Scales and about a 5½-point gain on the Performance Scale, presumable due to some type of culture-related change between 1953 and 1978 that affected all adults who were between the ages of 20 and 49 in 1953. Kaufman (1990) adjusted the estimated WAIS IQs earned by each cohort in 1978 for these time-lag effects to remove the influence of cultural change.

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Sources:

* Kaufman, A. S. (2005). *Assessing adolescent and adult intelligence* (3rd ed.). Wiley.
* Parker, K. C. H. (1986). Changes with age, year-of-birth cohort, age by year-of-birth interaction, and standardization of the Wechsler adult intelligence tests. *Human Development, 29*, 209-222. doi:10.1159/000273048
> 2 votes

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Tags: measurement, intelligence, developmental-psychology
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# Question
Title: Is it possible to create artificial thoughts in a childs mind
What I mean is, is it possible to create memories in a childs mind, memories which a child grows up to remember as real events, when infact those events never happened in real life?

For example:

If a child has a fear of bugs, and has never been bitten by bugs, if I keep telling the child that "bugs will never bite your arm". If I say this phrase every single day to a child, 5 to 10 times a day for a year, what are the chances of that child having a dream that a bug comes up to the child and bites him/her on the arm? Then when the child grows up, s/he remembers a vague memory of a bug bitting him/her which s/he thinks was a real event which happened in the passed.

Is this sort of this possible?

# Answer
It's possible to instill a false memory, even a traumatic one, in an adult. Children have been known to be more susceptible to suggestion since the 19th century (Binet, 1900, 1905).

Here are some example references of memory implantation:

Porter, S., Yuille, J. C., & Lehman, D. R. (1999). The nature of real, implanted, and fabricated memories for emotional childhood events: Implications for the recovered memory debate. *Law and Human Behavior*, *23*(5), 517-537.

Zaragoza, M. S., & Mitchell, K. J. (1996).Repeated exposure to suggestion and the creation of false memories. *PsychologicalScience*, *7*, 294-300.

(specifically memory implantation in kids)

Loftus, E. F., Coan, J. A., & Pickrell, J. E. (1996).Manufacturing false memories using bits of reality. In L. Reder (Ed.), *Implicit memory and metacognition* (pp. 195-220). Mahwah, NJ:Erlbaum
> 11 votes

# Answer
For more recent work on false memories, look at this paper. The authors provide a biological basis for false memories. They also implant false memories in mice.

**Source**

Steve Ramirez, Xu Liu, Pei-Ann Lin, Junghyup Suh, Michele Pignatelli, Roger L. Redondo, Tomás J. Ryan, and Susumu Tonegawa. Creating a False Memory in the Hippocampus. Science, 26 July 2013: 387-391 DOI:
> 8 votes

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Tags: memory, developmental-psychology, philosophy-of-mind
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# Question
Title: Have humans always had problems with motivation and laziness?
I originally wanted to ask a question "Is there a drug for motivation or laziness", but google search revealed that people have been asking this question for years and there's no drug that is currently prescribed to fix those issues.

This makes me interested in the the following question: **Did "motivation issues" or laziness always exist for humans, or is it something that became a much bigger problem because of the modern lifestyle or cuture?**

For example, I'm thinking of peasants of "ye olde days", who had to work really hard to get by, or early factory workers, who apparently did 12+ hour shifts from a very early age. Those people had no drugs or cognitive-behavior therapy to correct their issues.

Maybe there's some "laziness scale" that could be used to look at historic trends in laziness and motivation?

UPDATE: it would be very interesting to examine if a correlation exists between laziness and workforce moving from working physically/outdoors(ex: farmers) towards working mentally indoors(office workers) over the years.

I would define laziness or motivational issues as **"I will do this tomorrow"** attitude (procrastination) or promising to do something, but delivering excuses as to why the task wasn't done. The task never gets started.

# Answer
A possible way to try to answer this, is to analyze usage of words such as lazy versus words such as diligent over the years. As a toy example, I used Google Ngram viewer to compare the frequency in which the words **lazy**, **indolent** and **slothful** are used in the main part of a sentence, to the frequency in which the words **diligent**, **industrious**, and **laborious** are used in the main part of a sentence (link).

It seems that indeed people were more hard working back in the 1800's, and are more lazy today. Or at least, that is what is what is reflected in what book authors write.

A similar trend exists if we omit the "main part of a sentence" thing, and simply look at the frequency of appearance of these words (link).

Word analysis is pretty powerful :
> 7 votes

# Answer
The change that is relevant to your question is not that from a rural farming life to an urban office-working one, but the neolithic revolution.

In early prehistory and during the palaeolithic period, our ancestors lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers. They did nothing but hunt and gather food. When they were sated, they relaxed. Because they had no fridges, food could not be stored, so there was no purpose in "working" more than was necessary for the momentary satisfaction of hunger or repairing of tents and hunting gear.

"Laziness" can be seen as a result of the necessity of sustaining the ecosystem that the hunters were dependent upon:

> Hunting results in rapidly diminishing returns – it is a risky, arduous and time-consuming business. This is reflected in the fact that predatory animals tend to be spectacularly lazy. Lions, for example, sleep or doze for at least twenty hours a day, and spend another two hours growling and grooming. They hunt for only about two hours a day. Kalahari bushmen have similar been shown to hunt for only about six hours a week \[sic!\]. 'Laziness' is a way of life for the big predator. (Tudge, 1998, p. 33)

Then, about 10.000 years ago, the first humans settled down and began agriculture. From this moment onwards, each day was filled with hard labor.

> ... farming changes the rules of the game. Farming manipulates the environment with the express purpose of overcoming its natural restraints. The more you manipulate, the more food you can produce. The harder farmers work the more food they can produce. Laziness is emphatically not favoured. A hunter who works twice as hard as average may get twice as much food in the short term, but will soon come unstuck as his prey disappears. But the farmer who works ten times as hard as his neighbor will indeed produce ten times as much food – and in favourable circumstances can sustain this tenfold increase indefinitely. (Tudge, 1998, p. 33)

Motivation for paleolithic hunter-gatherers was simply the need to not go hungry. It was not something that you did not have. You either hunted or died. The very concept of motivation does not fit such a life, because action sprang directly from your basic needs. While those needs were satisfied, there was no need for action: "laziness, nomadism and sharing were all integral parts of the Aboriginal life-style" (Ward, 1988).

Hunter-gatherer life is the garden Eden that Adam was sent forth from: "thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread". Rowley-Conwy, in his aptly titled article "The laziness of the short-distance hunter" (1984), argues that for one Mesolithic community in western Denmark at least, "farming was not adopted until problems arose with the hunter-gatherer economy".

If you want to study how problems with motivation came about, you'll need to go look at the difference between nomadic hunter-gatherer and settled farmer life.

Evolutionary psychology assumes "that our minds and bodies are adapted for an ancestral environment", and "that we suffer the consequences of poor fit between our inherited natures and many of the constructed environments in organizational society" (Nicholson, 1997).

Geary and Bjorklund (2000) think that motivation depends on the type of ability that is necessary for performance:

> ... much of formal education is "unnatural" in that much of what children are taught involves tasks never encountered by our ancestors (Brown & Bjorklund, 1998; Geary, 1995). Although humans apparently have been using language for thousands of years, it is only in this century that the majority of people on the planet are literate. Geary (1995) referred to language and other evolved forms of cognition, such as those represented in Figure 1 \[nonverbal behavior, language, facial processing, theory of mind, kin, in-group, out-group, social ideologies, flora, fauna, movement, representation, engineering\], as *biologically primary abilities*, and skills that build upon these primary abilities but are principally cultural inventions, such as reading, as *biologically secondary abilities*. Biologically primary abilities are acquired universally and children typically have **high motivation** to perform tasks involving them. In contrast, biologically secondary abilities are culturally determined, and often **tedious repetition and external motivation** are necessary for their mastery. From this perspective, it is understandable that many children have difficulty with reading and higher mathematics. (emphasis added)

And from this perspective it is also understandable that most of us aren't very motivated to perform those of our daily chores that require biologically secondary abilities, and I would surmise that the motivation declines as we move towards abilities that build upon abilities that ... are more and more removed from our biologically primary concerns.

---

Sources:

* Geary, D. C., & Bjorklund, D. F. (2000). Evolutionary developmental psychology. *Child Development, 71*, 57-65. doi:10.1111/1467-8624.00118
* Nicholson, N. (1997). Evolutionary psychology: Toward a new view of human nature and organizational society. *Human Relations, 50*, 1053-1078. doi:10.1177/001872679705000901
* Rowley-Conwy, P. (1984). The laziness of the short-distance hunter: The origins of agriculture in western Denmark. *Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 3*, 300-324. doi:10.1016/0278-4165(84)90005-9
* Tudge, C. (1998). *Neanderthals, Bandits, and Farmers: How Agriculture Really Began*. New Haven: Yale University Press.
* Ward, R. (1988). Aboriginal communists. *Labour History, 55*, 1-8. http://www.jstor.org/stable/i27508887
> 14 votes

# Answer
Although it would be hard to experiment on dead peasants, I believe that the `Status Quo Bias` promotes the idea that laziness is a human trait. You can see the orignal research here, or just google the term.

Samuelson, W., & Zeckhauser, R. (1988). Status quo bias in decision making. Journal of risk and uncertainty, 1(1), 7-59.
> 8 votes

# Answer
It seems that what you are getting at might be related to “akrasia” or “weakness of the will” (those two are slightly different ideas). Roughly, it's the experience that you know something to be the right course of action, want (in some sense) to follow it but still do not succeed in actually doing it. Since classical Greek philosophers have written about it, it would seem to have been an experience humans made before modern times.

Another relevant observation is that being unable to do things one wishes to do and feeling bad about it is an important aspect of depression or even simply sadness. One would (hopefully!) not apply a pejorative word like laziness to someone who is suffering but that could be interpreted as a form of “motivation problem”. Since depression (or “melancholia”) has also been described a long time ago, this is further evidence that all this did not appear in modern times.
> 5 votes

# Answer
Your question "I will do this tomorrow" is well studied under term procrastination. As you can see on wikipedia page:

There are a lot of causes and "how to measure"....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrastination

It is true that some form of procrastination was noticed in ancient Greeks, but it is became very important in industrial revolution with concept of time was valued more...
> 1 votes

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Tags: motivation, behaviorism
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# Question
Title: Is the concept of conservation fundamental to understanding fairness and capacity in "love"?
I heard this comment on a radio program about Child parenting by psychologists: "A child will not comprehend an explanation that, a parent loves each sibling equally, as they do not have abstract thinking". This lead me to ponder and formulate the question.

# Answer
> 5 votes
There are a number of ways to interpret the statement and your question.

One problem is what the age of children being discussed is. There are lots of developmental studies showing abstract thinking not really kicking in until about 5 or 6, but most of them are on physical abstraction. You can look up anything on Piaget's stages of development for this. Abstraction in general id acquired relatively early.

The word "understand" is a problematic bit. Children understand fairness, equal division, etc. at a very young age. I don't even see that as particularly abstract. On the other hand, some people spend their whole lives trying to understand the nuances of what love means. Children have some concept of love at a pretty young.

As near as I can tell, the statement you heard is vacuous without context and intent.

# Answer
> 5 votes
What is love?
What does a person mean, when they say they love someone?
What does a parent mean who says that they love their children equally?

I am now 46 years old, and I have no idea what "love" is or what it means when I myself say that I "love" someone.

To my knowledge, "love" is not a concept in psychology, but in philosophy, where speculations about transcendental ideas such as "freedom", "truth", or "evil", are at home, or in sociology, where the norms relating to these ideals are studied.

Related psychological concepts are:

* bonding
* attraction
* trust
* etc.

Psychology studies what people do and how they feel, when they call it "love".

But let's ignore these objections for a minute and assume that we know and agree upon what love is. Let's take an everyday definition.

If you understand love as selfless commitment to another's wellbeing, then young children are not able to love (because their only purpose in life is survival, not generativity), and able to understand love only from the perspective of the rightful receiver: they are "made" to expect parental love and cannot comprehend that it might be modulated, because their survival and development depends on its presence.

Children learn to understand that other people might have different things going on in their minds than they themselves, and they learn to consider the needs and wishes of other persons, from about the age of 6 years onwards, a development that (ideally) reaches its conclusion (i.e. full understanding) at about the age of 12 (with all the individual variation that is normal for human beings).

Therefore a young child will not understand a parent's statement that they love all their children equally from the definition given above (or any other such definition), but interpret it from the context: what did the child, its siblings, and the parents do, that led up to make such a statement necessary in the first place? Just take a minute and think about if and when you would say such a thing to two persons you love. Only when there was doubt that you loved them equally.

Thus, the meaning the child gives to this sentence might be: *We treat you differently, but we expect you to act as if we didn't.*

So a child will very likely not think about anything like what adult philosophers understand when they speak of love, but about how his or her family interacts with each other and how he or she feels about that.

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If you disagree with my statement that love is not a concept in psychology, please provide a source and quote a peer reviewed definition.

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, learning, developmental-psychology
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# Question
Title: Any review articles on behavior change psychology?
I'm interested in behavior change and looking to apply its principals in order to design programs and services in healthcare. I'm most familiar with BJ Fogg's B=MAT model and his principles. But I'd love to get suggestions that let me go deeper into this topic and how it can tie into applied work.

**What are good review articles on behavioural change psychology?**

# Answer
**Elder et al (1999)** provides a review of behavioural change theories in the context of health behavior change in primary care. They mention several, for example:

> Models and theories such as the Health Belief Model, Cognitive/Information Processing, the Theory of Reasoned Action, Social Cognitive (Learning) Theory,Social Support Theories, Behavior Modiﬁcation, and Kanfer’s Parallel Self-Management Model guide much of current health-promotion reFsearch and practice. The Transtheoretical or “Stages of Change” Model presents a cognitive-behavioral change process not grounded in a speciic health behavior theory.

**Green (1984)** provides a very general review of health behavior modification.

**Stokols (1992)** presents a theory around healthy environments.

### References

* Elder, J. P., Ayala, G. X., & Harris, S. (1999). Theories and intervention approaches to health-behavior change in primary care. American journal of preventive medicine, 17(4), 275-284. PDF
* Green, L. W. (1984). Modifying and developing health behavior. Annual review of public health, 5(1), 215-236. PDF
* Stokols, D. (1992). Establishing and maintaining healthy environments: toward a social ecology of health promotion. American Psychologist, 47(1), 6. PDF
> 6 votes

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Tags: reference-request, motivation, health-psychology
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title: What drives civilization?

text:
# Question
Title: What drives civilization?
Fossil record indicates humanity arose on the African Continent - in/around Gauteng. Yet the oldest civilizations on record are far afield - Ebla, Mesopotamia

**What drives *civilization*?** Why is the cradle of civilization not nearer the cradle of humanity?

In my opinion *civilization* is that state of intellect when beings of a community recognize that collaboration rather than competition for resources is feasible, and actively work in that direction (granted we humans still have competition at the level of village, town, company, & nation). Unlike other contemporary civilizations (ants and bees for instance) humans are not segregated into castes such as the warrior, worker - intellect drives human civilization.

# Answer
Not a real explanation of why writing or cities appeared where they appeared but by that time humans had already spread to many parts of the world so I am not sure there is any particular need to explain why they did not appear in southern Africa, specifically.

Also, the “cradle of humankind” in Gauteng is a large source of hominin fossils (possibly for reasons that have more to do with their preservation than anything else), not of *homo sapiens sapiens* or anatomically modern humans. We are not talking about the same periods at all (millions of years before present vs. 200 000 years for *homo sapiens sapiens* and 6000 years for writing).
> 2 votes

# Answer
In my opinion the question is not of-topic, because of two reasons:

1) Scientifically, it is hard to approve or not, but Sigmund Freud wrote about it in book: Totem and Taboo wrote that civilization start when human offsprings decided not to kill father and that strongest among them become new "leadeor of herd/doggery" It could explain debate cradle of humanity - craddle of civilization.

2) In Social psychology it is known model of Terror management theory. In this wikipedia articles you have numerous references.

Why I think it is relevant for this web site is relation: neuroscience - cognitive science - social psychology and related social cognition and socila neuroscience.

EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror\_management\_theory#References

EDIT2: Answer: According to Terror management theory people are interested to maintain civilization to maintain illusion of immortality.

Source: Blackwell Handbook of Social Psychology: Intraindividual Processes

http://books.google.hr/books?id=4AVi-a7\_BCAC&pg=PA281&lpg=PA281&dq=Blackwell+Handbook+of+Social+Psychology:+Intraindividual+Processes+terror+management+theory&source=bl&ots=kk-BnZbm\_X&sig=HX6p9AjKGxjPmJMUTpGpB7Eb3Cg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=8Cn6UfvqJYLLtQb89YCYDg&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Blackwell%20Handbook%20of%20Social%20Psychology%3A%20Intraindividual%20Processes%20terror%20management%20theory&f=false
> 1 votes

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Tags: social-psychology, evolution, rationality
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