# Question
Title: What does White guilt feel like, how does it socially manifest itself & is it treatable?
White guilt would appear to be a genuine phenomenon which only White people can ever experience - and yet many people deny that it exists, at all, or that it is a form of phoney Liberalism or, worse, "reverse racism".

However, such denials are suggestive of the very thing being denied. White guilt thus appears to feature characteristics of emotional self-indulgence, anger and the desire for forgiveness & personal acceptance.

Is White guilt the same or similar to other forms of guilt, or does it have its own unique characteristics setting it apart from other functions of the human conscience?

White guilt

# Answer
Given the asker's assertion (in a comment) that

> White guilt results in Black people being killed

here's a repetition of what is usually meant by this term (copied from Wikipedia):

> White guilt is the individual or collective guilt felt by some white people for harm resulting from racist treatment of ethnic minorities by other white people both historically and currently in the United States and to a lesser extent in Canada, South Africa and the United Kingdom.

Like all guilt, White guilt is associated with intentions of making amends toward victims. I think the OP's comment and the question are prompted by a failure to distinguish guilt as a psychological process and guilt as a legal concept.

Psychological guilt only exist if it is interiorized. A psychopath can be judged guilty by a court but feel no (psychological) guilt whatsoever himself. Here's a primer on guilt, in the psychological sense:

> Guilt may be defined as the dysphoric feeling associated with the recognition that one has violated a personally relevant moral or social standard. \[...\]
>
> In principle, guilt may be characterized as having both adaptive and maladaptive consequences. On the one hand, guilt experienced at moderate levels is described as serving a positive social function in inhibiting anormative behavior or, in the event of transgression, in stimulating impulses to make restitution and seek forgiveness (Ausubel, 1955). On the other hand, excessive or inappropriate guilt is also assumed to result in dysfunctional and disruptive experiences and, in some cases, clinical disorders (Lewis, 1971).

And regarding White guilt, here some of its correlates:

> In two studies, the authors investigated guilt as a response to group-based advantage. Consistent with its conceptualization as a self-focused emotion, White guilt was based in self-focused beliefs in racial inequality. Thus, guilt was associated with belief in White privilege (Study 1) and resulted from seeing European Americans as perpetrators of racial discrimination (Study 2). Just as personal guilt is associated with efforts at restitution, White guilt was predictive of support for affirmative action programs aimed at compensating African Americans. White guilt was not, however, predictive of support for noncompensatory efforts at promoting equality, such as affirmative action programs that increase opportunities (Study 2). In contrast, the other-focused emotion of group-based sympathy was a more general predictor of support for different affirmative action policies. Our findings demonstrate the benefits and limits of group-based guilt as a basis of support for social equality and highlight the value of understanding the specific emotions elicited in intergroup contexts.

So (to state the obvious) white guilt not unique in the sense that it's part of a larger category of "group-based guilt", sometime called "collective guilt". Another example of the latter that has been investigated a fair bit is German collective guilt with respect to the Nazi atrocities (and I'm not talking about guilt in the legal sense here, but the psychological one.) Likewise for colonial injustices. And since in this latter case the perpetrators were usually white, while the victims were not... here's the abstract:

> An investigation of the role of group-based shame and guilt in motivating citizens of ex-colonial countries to support restitution to former colonized groups which were the target of violence and oppression. Study 1 (N = 125) was conducted in Australia during the lead-up to the first official government apology to Aboriginal Australians. Among white Australians, guilt and shame were associated with attitudinal support for intergroup apology and victim compensation. However, only shame was associated with actual political behaviour (signing a petition in support of the apology). Study 2 (N = 181), conducted in Britain, focussed on Britain’s violent mistreatment of the Kenyan population during decolonization. It tested a hypothesis that there are two forms of shame—essence shame and image shame—and demonstrated that image shame was associated with support for apology, whereas essence shame was associated with support for more substantial material and financial compensation.

Since guilt and shame aren't easily delineated, you you'd have dive into the paper for their specific definitions. (The paper is open access, so I'm not going to reproduce all their definitions here.)

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Guilt is not considered a mental disorder per se. There are no proposed treatments for guilt by itself, if by "treatment" you mean the usual sense of the word (medical, psychological). Making reparations could be considered a "treatment" for some very loose meaning of the word.

See Bybee and Quiles (1998) for a proposed framework for relating (type of) guilt to mental illness in general. Since this is a book chapter and lacks an authors' summary, here are two (one from the publisher, which is mostly quoting the conclusion section of the chapter, and another form the psycNET; the latter is mostly listing chapter sub-headings)

> Guilt plays a prominent role in cognitive theories of mental illness as well. Guilt has been associated with a number of internalizing disorders, but most frequently with depression. When guilt is chronic, it becomes closely linked with symptoms of mental illness. Perhaps the most important implication of the present work is the importance of alleviating guilt constructively and effectively. Lewis suggests that reaction formation or sublimation might be therapeutic for the individual experiencing chronic guilt. Even if the other person is dead, the guilty individual might provide indirect reparation by giving to charity in memory or honor of the deceased or by providing social or financial support to the deceased person's family. \[...\] Individuals might be encouraged to seek forgiveness for transgressions they have committed even when these lapses occurred long ago. Indeed, if guilt feelings are still operative years later, this may provide all the more reason for individuals to work to resolve them.
>
> Is guilt related to mental illness? The authors discuss a theoretical perspective intended to address and elucidate relationships between guilt and symptoms of mental illness. The basic principles of the model are: (1) Two fundamentally different forms of guilt exist that show radically different relationships to mental health. (2) Predispositional guilt, no matter how intense, is not maladaptive. (3) Chronic, unalleviated guilt is maladaptive. (4) Predispositional guilt is related to fewer symptoms of externalizing disorders and sociopathy. (5) Predispositional guilt is distinguishable from cognition, knowledge, and moral standards: guilt, not moral standards, is related to prosocial behavior. (6) Chronic, unalleviated guilt is associated with more severe symptoms of externalizing disorders. (7) Chronic guilt is distinguishable from shame: both are maladaptive and show distinct relationships to indices of psychopathology. (8) Characteristics of the individual may determine whether guilt is short-lived or chronic, in turn, affecting mental health. (9) Reactions to the precipitating situations may determine whether guilt becomes chronic (or is absent), in turn, affecting mental health. (10) The nature of the guilt-evoking events may determine whether guilt is short-lived or chronic, in turn, affecting mental health.

And if you wonder what they mean by those two types:

> The central tenet of the present theory is that two fundamentally different variants of guilt exist: predispositional guilt, which is a personality proclivity for experiencing guilt in response to specific, circumscribed, eliciting situations, and chronic guilt, an ongoing condition of guiltiness, regret, and remorse unattached to an immediate precipitating event. We argue that these two forms of guilt display profoundly different relationships to mental health.

I've only skimmed the chapter, but they don't seem to discuss any form of collective guilt. I don't know if there is any research relating some form of collective guilt to (some) mental illness.

Also note that reactive formation is a psychoanalytic theory, so it may not have much empirical basis. Likewise for sublimation.
> 1 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, social-psychology, personality, racism
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# Question
Title: Is the visual cortex of a newborn baby immediately capable of object detection or is this skill learned over time, and if so, how?
Is the visual cortex of newborn babies right off the bat capable of making sense of raw visual data, for instance, converting the constant stream of raw RGB images perceived by the eyes into a meaningful higher-level representation of objects in motion in a 3D world? Yes? No? If not, then does it mean this skill has to be developed over time by means of some **learning mechanism**?

If the visual cortex needs time to learn advanced visual skills, how does the actual learning mechanism work? Does the visual cortex have to optimize the connections between neurons, in a way analogous to how artificial neural networks optimize their parameters through backpropagation algorithm (machine learning)? If this is the case, then where does the visual cortex get its error signals from? To make the last question clear, in machine learning the typical approach is to compute the gradient of a loss function which compares the model's prediction with the ground truth, and the model's parameters are updated by moving the parameters in the direction of the gradient. If the visual cortex is learning advanced visual skills by virtue of a similar learning mechanism, then what kind of loss function is the visual cortex optimizing?

# Answer
A newborn baby has difficulty focusing its eyes or telling the difference between two objects presented to it.

A baby learns to recognise its mothers face within the first week after birth, long before it can recognise objects that are not faces. They already show a preference for face-like visual stimuli while in the womb.

> The Human Fetus Preferentially Engages with Face-like Visual Stimuli Reid et al. Current Biology, March 05, 2018 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2017.05.044

Babies start to follow moving objects with their eyes at around three months. They are capable of depth perception and have good colour vision by five months (at birth many babies are incapable of detecting some colours).

The American optometric association has a page on infant vision:

https://www.aoa.org/patients-and-public/good-vision-throughout-life/childrens-vision/infant-vision-birth-to-24-months-of-age

In precocial animals object recognition abilities are apparent very early on. For instance, chicks which are presented with an object immediately after they have hatched will often follow that object as if it were their mother. They show a preference for moving objects over stationary objects. For more information on this check out http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Imprinting.

The visual cortex already starts off with areas specialised for edge detection, colour detection, motion detection etc. However, much of visual perception is learned - if an animal has its eyes patched over at birth then it will have limited perceptual abilities when the patches are removed.

As for the question of how errors are propagated through the visual cortex, Seanny123's answer to this question might be relevant: Is back-prop biologically plausible?
> 1 votes

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Tags: neuroscience, vision, neural-network, perceptual-learning
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# Question
Title: What is the difference between experience and knowledge and how could we make use of that in machine learning and AI applications?
Let's suppose that i am a blind person whom never had any experience with sight before. I will also suppose that i have started some courses to learn about the eyes and the way it function with detailed explanation of every single component of the "seeing" process. according to previous studies in the field, i will never know " what is to see" until i have a direct experience with that. Building upon that, how could we distinguish experience from knowledge for the application of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning?

# Answer
> 1 votes
If you can't see now why would you be able to see later if nothing has changed? It's not part of your capabilities.

So the statement "I will never know what is to see until i have a direct experience with that" isn't actually possible because you can't have the experience without knowing what it is you're experiencing ... how would you be able to identify something if you have no knowledge of it?

Regardless... Knowledge is objective - Mary had a little lamb. Experience is subjective - It was a painful pregnancy.

So if you have no knowledge of baseball and I give you the rules book would you know how to play baseball?

Yep. Would you understand baseball? Nope.

The rules are the knowledge. The playing is the experience - giving context to the information.

Deep Blue beats the best chess players. It has no understanding of chess.

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Tags: experimental-psychology
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# Question
Title: Psychological effects of statutory rape - differences by gender?
Occasionally, criminal cases where female teachers have sex with male students make the news. I have the impression that many people are much less critical of that than when the victim is female, and some say they'd have been thrilled at the prospect of that happening to them when they were teenage boys.

I don't see the same happening when girls get raped by their teachers; I don't see similar jealousy from women. **That makes me wonder:** is there a significant difference in the psychological effects of statutory rape on teens, assuming the teens saw the rape as consensual from their perspective? Are there insights by gender on how many teens that were victims of statutory rape considered the events consensual (ignoring whether we would classify their "consent" as such in a cognitive-development sense), and how that affected the effects of the rape on their psyche?

---

Googling these issues brings up a large body of heavily political opinion with very scattered actual references and data that I could look into, and none of the material I could find addressed the questions I'm curious about scientifically. Even an article on psychologytoday.com that seemed relevant doesn't have any actual references to data or studies. An article on psychiatrictimes.com focused on female offenders and said nothing substantial about the effects on male victims, or how the effects compare to those experienced by female victims. I couldn't find any science-journalistic articles (or books) that would offer any insight better than those two.

scholar.google.com had a lot of material, most of it was focused on the experiences of females, and I couldn't find any that compared the effects on males and females, or that made any evaluation that took the willingness of the victims into account.

Basically, there's a lot of politicized material that's largely useless as a source of knowledge about the subject, and a decent amount of scientific material that I don't have the necessary skills and knowledge to evaluate or navigate.

# Answer
> 5 votes
The following is a culmination of research I have conducted over a long time on the very subject.

## The term "statutory rape"

This is a generic term and some consider it to include just victims under the age of consent, and some consider it to include victims aged 16-18 or older who are being taught in college/university. Therefore, I would first like to address the term "statutory rape".

> Of all offenders of male statutory rape victims, 70% were age 21 and older, while 45% of offenders of female statutory rape victims were 21 and older (Troup-Leasure & Snyder, 2005).

This has been amalgamated to form the statistic that young adults under age 25 are the most common perpetrators known to law enforcement (Oudekerk, et al. 2013), because most (95%) statutory rape victims were female according to Troup-Leasure & Snyder, (2005).

**One important point of note here** is that the figures, as with all official rape and sexual assault statistics can only be based on cases reported to the police. Many cases go unreported for many reasons, and therefore these statistics can be a little skewed.

In common law jurisdictions, statutory rape is **nonforcible** sexual activity in which one of the individuals is below the age of consent (the age required to legally consent to the behavior) (Cusack, 2015; Troup-Leasure & Snyder, 2005). Although it usually refers to adults engaging in sexual contact with minors under the age of consent, it is a generic term, and very few jurisdictions use the actual term statutory rape in the language of statutes (Davis & Twombly, 2000)

Different jurisdictions use many different statutory terms for the crime, such as sexual assault, rape of a child, corruption of a minor, unlawful sex with a minor, carnal knowledge of a minor, unlawful carnal knowledge, sexual battery or simply carnal knowledge.

The terms child sexual abuse or child molestation may also be used, but statutory rape generally refers to sex between an adult and a sexually mature minor past the age of puberty, and may therefore be distinguished from child sexual abuse (Cusack, 2015; Fradella & Sumner, 2016). Sexual relations with a prepubescent child in this case is typically treated as a more serious crime.

In statutory rape laws, overt force or threat is not present. Statutory rape laws presume coercion, because a minor or mentally handicapped adult is legally incapable of giving consent to the act.

## Female on male statutory rape

Until the late 1970s, sex involving an adult female and an underage male was often ignored by the law, due to the belief that it is often sexual initiation for the younger male (Gartner, 2001) This view still exists within the public viewpoint, as it is glamorized by the media and there may be a gender bias in courts on teacher-student sexual relationships (though these relationships are illegal regardless of age).

To add to this, in at least one case, the U.S. courts have held that male victims of statutory rape **may** be liable for child support for any children resulting from the crime. In *County of San Luis Obispo v. Nathaniel J* (California courts of appeal, 1996). the 15-year-old victim Nathaniel J. discussed a future relationship with the perpetrator (a 34-year-old woman) and stated that the sex was "mutually agreeable". Given this testimony, the California Court of Appeal held Nathaniel J. financially responsible for his child. The court stated the boy was "not an innocent victim" of the sexual intercourse.

## Early Research

The way that long-term effects of child sexual abuse (CSA) have come to be put together reflects, in no small measure, the very particular circumstances that surrounded the revelation of CSA as an all too common event in the lives of children. The first phase of modern research into CSA was not triggered by observations on child victims, but by the self-disclosures of adults who had the courage to publicly give witness to their abuse as children. These early self-revealed victims who were studied, exclusively women, had often been the victims of incestuous abuse, and plausibly attributed many of their current personal difficulties to their sexual abuse as children. This contrasts with the emergence of child abuse as a public health and research issue that has been driven by the observations of professionals caring for abused children

## Long-term impact on mental health

There have been numerous studies examining the association between a history of CSA and mental health problems in adult life that have employed clinical samples, convenience samples (usually students), and random community samples. There is now an established body of knowledge clearly linking a history of CSA with higher rates in adult life of depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, substance abuse disorders, eating disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (Briere & Runtz 1988; Winfield et al. 1990; Bushnell et al. 1992; Mullen et al. 1993; Romans et al. 1995; Romans et al. 1997; Fergusson et al. 1996a; Fergusson et al. 1996b; Silverman et al. 1996; Fleming et al. 1998; Fleming et al. 1999). A more controversial literature links multiple personality disorder with CSA (Bucky & Dallenberg 1992; Spanos 1996).

## Unravelling the associations between abuse and long-term problems

There is a wide range of potential adverse adult outcomes associated with CSA. However, although there is a proposal by Karen Rodman, Director and Founder of FAAAS Inc (Families of Adults Afflicted with Asperger's Syndrome) for Post-Traumatic Relationship Syndrome or Ongoing Traumatic Relationship Syndrome (OTRS), there is no unique pattern to the long-term effects and no **real** distinctly specific “post-abuse syndrome” that I have found. This suggests that CSA is best viewed as a risk factor for a wide range of subsequent problems.

In studies on the long-term impact of CSA that employ adult subjects, it is all too easy to forget the abuse occurred in childhood, and to resort to applying inappropriately adult-centred conceptualisations.

The sexual abuse of children occurs during a period in life where complex and, hopefully, ordered changes are occurring in the child's physical, psychological and social being. The state of flux leaves the child vulnerable to sustaining damage that will detrimentally affect the normal developmental processes. The impact of abuse is likely to be modified by the developmental stage at which it occurs. It will also vary according to how resilient the child is in terms of their psychological and social development up to that point. A child who has already had to cope with, for example, a problematic family background or prior emotional abuse, will be more vulnerable to the additional blow of CSA.

These suppositions are borne out by studies that have demonstrated powerful interactions between the child's prior exposure to potentially damaging situations, and the degree of adult disturbance apparently associated with a history of CSA (Mullen et al. 1993; Mullen et al. 1994; Fergusson et al. 1996a; Fergusson et al. 1996b; Fergusson et al. 1997a; Fergusson et al. 1997b).

The long-term effects of CSA will also be modified by the individual's experience subsequent to the abuse. Romans et al. (1995 and 1997) demonstrated that long-term problems following CSA were significantly lower in those who had supportive and confiding relationships with their mothers and in those who, as adolescents, experienced some success at school or with peers. The nature of this success (academic, social or sporting), is probably less important than the accompanying strengthening of self-esteem and enhancement of opportunities for effective social interactions with peers.

The relationship between the potential damage inflicted on elements in the child's development and subsequent mitigating factors is complex. For example, the observation that those victims of CSA who manage to establish and maintain stable marital relationships are protected against some of the potentially adverse outcomes of CSA (Cole & Putnam 1992) may reflect, in part, the mitigating and healing influence of patience and understanding from their partners.

Peters (1988) suggested that CSA interacts with family background to produce disruption of the child's developing self-esteem and sense of mastery of the world (agency). It is these deficits that increase the likelihood of psychological problems in later life. This model of developmental deficits leading to social and personal vulnerabilities in adult life, which in their turn create an increased risk of mental health problems, can usefully be expanded.

Those with histories of CSA, have an increased risk of social, interpersonal and sexual problems in adult life. This association may play a role in creating at least some of the far better-known associations between CSA and mental health problems.

Greater vulnerability to depression is found in women who lack a trusting, intimate and confiding relationship (Henderson and Brown 1988; Harris 1988; Romans et al. 1992). Depression is also associated with lowered self-esteem and a sense of hopelessness about one's ability to influence one's life (Browne & Finkelhor 1986, Ingham et al. 1986). Therefore, the social, interpersonal and sexual problems associated with a history of CSA may themselves provide fertile ground for the development of mental health problems, particularly in the area of depressive disorders.

A plausible hypothesis can be put forward that the developmental disruption in CSA victims' sense of self-esteem, sense of agency, sense of the world as a safe enough environment, in their capacity for entering trusting intimate relationships and, finally, in their developing sexuality, leads in adult life to an increased risk of low self-esteem, social and economic failure, social insecurity and isolation, difficulties with intimacy and sexual problems.

## Gender Differences

Research continues to depict CSA as predominantly perpetrated against female children. It is estimated that 1 in 20 children in the UK have been sexually assaulted (Radford et al. 2011). According to the Office for National Statistics, between March 2003 and September 2018, 82% of sexual assaults in England and Wales were on girls under 16 leaving 18% on boys under 16 (Table A4 in Elkin (2019)). In Australia, in 2003, 76% of recorded sexual assault victims aged under 15 years of age were female and 24% were male (Trewin, 2004).

The thing to remember about crime statistics are these are **only assaults which are reported to the police** and many go unreported (Gregory & Lees, 1999).

> Child sexual abuse is clearly an issue in need of a nuanced understanding of both male and female victims. Research suggests that the sexual abuse of boys is far more common than generally believed (Dorahy & Clearwater, 2012). This is emerging from studies of clergy-perpetrated sexual abuse and from studies of gay and bisexual men. The prevalence rates for both groups are significantly higher than the more commonly cited figures for males in the general population (Jinich et al., 1998; Wilson & Widom, 2010). In relation to clergy-perpetrated abuse, it is becoming clear, as outlined earlier, that boys are much more likely than girls to be the victims of this type of abuse, though it may not be formally reported to authorities for some time, if ever (John Jay College, 2004; Parkinson et al., 2010).
>
> \- Cashmore & Shackel (2013)

Talking to male victims myself in my line of work over the years has revealed that boys suffer the same as girls, with additional problems whereby cultural images of how "real men" should think, feel and act can create problems (Price-Robertson, 2012).

> powerful barriers to male victim/survivors of child sexual abuse disclosing their experiences to others, accepting their experience as one that may have had a formative influence on their lives, and healing from the trauma of the abuse … \[This\] means that many in society have difficulty fully acknowledging and accepting the reality of the sexual abuse of males during childhood/adolescence, and the trauma it can inflict. (p. 5)

Table 2 in Cashmore & Shackel (2013) summarises the findings from 11 studies on the impact of CSA on males and a comparison between male survivors of child sexual abuse and female survivors and non-abused men. Overall, research on the effects of CSA amongst male victims indicates that male survivors often "experience the event as traumatic and that psychological distress is a common long-term correlate" of such abuse.

## References

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California courts of appeal (1996). *County of San Luis Obispo v. Nathaniel J* \[Online\]
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Jinich, S., Paul, J. P., Stall, R., Acree, M., Kegeles, S., Hoff, C., & Coates, T. J. (1998). Childhood sexual abuse and HIV risk-taking behavior among gay and bisexual men. *AIDS and Behavior, 2*(1), 41-51. doi: 10.1023/A:1022307323744

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Oudekerk, B. A., Farr, R. H., & Reppucci, N. D. (2013). Is it love or sexual abuse? Young adults' perceptions of statutory rape. *Journal of child sexual abuse, 22*(7), 858-877. doi: 10.1080/10538712.2013.830668

Parkinson, P. N., Oates, R. K., & Jayakody, A. A. (2012). Child sexual abuse in the Anglican Church of Australia. *Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, 21*(5), 553-570. doi: 10.1080/10538712.2012.689424

Price-Robertson, R. (2012). *Fathers with a History of Child Sexual Abuse: New Findings for Policy and Practice* (CFCA Paper No. 6). Australian Institute of Family Studies. Retrievable from: https://aifs.gov.au/cfca/publications/fathers-history-child-sexual-abuse-new-findings-f/introduction

Peters, S. D. (1988). Child sexual abuse and later psychological problems. In *Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association, 93rd, Aug, 1985, Los Angeles, CA, US*. Sage Publications, Inc. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1988-98633-005

Radford, L., Corral, S., Bradley, C., Fisher, H., Bassett, C., Howat, N., & Collishaw, S. (2011). Child abuse and neglect in the UK today. London: NSPCC. Retrievable from: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.466.6459&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Romans, S. E., Walton, V. A., Herbison, G. P., & Mullen, P. E. (1992). Social networks and psychiatric morbidity in New Zealand women. *Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 26*(3), 485-492. doi: 10.3109/00048679209072075

Romans, S. E., Martin, J. L., Anderson, J. C., Herbison, G. P., & Mullen, P. E. (1995). Sexual abuse in childhood and deliberate self-harm. *American Journal of Psychiatry, 152*(9), 1336-1342. doi: 10.1176/ajp.152.9.1336

Romans, S., Martin, J., & Mullen, P. (1997). Childhood sexual abuse and later psychological problems: Neither necessary, sufficient nor acting alone. *Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health, 7*(4), 327-338. doi: 10.1002/cbm.193

Silverman, A. B., Reinherz, H. Z., & Giaconia, R. M. (1996). The long-term sequelae of child and adolescent abuse: A longitudinal community study. *Child abuse & neglect, 20*(8), 709-723. doi: 10.1016/0145-2134(96)00059-2

Spanos, N. P. (1996), *Multiple Identities and False Memories: A Sociocognitive Perspective*. Washington, DC, US: American Psychological Association. doi: 10.1037/10216-000

Trewin, D. (2004). Sexual assault in Australia: A statistical overview. Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics. Retrievable from: http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs%40.nsf/DetailsPage/4523.02004

Troup-Leasure, K., & Snyder, H. (2005). *Statutory rape known to law enforcement (Juvenile Justice Bulletin No. NCJ 208803)*. Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. pdf: https://classic.ntis.gov/assets/pdf/st-on-cd/PB2007105633.pdf

Wilson, H. W., & Widom, C. S. (2010). Does physical abuse, sexual abuse, or neglect in childhood increase the likelihood of same-sex sexual relationships and cohabitation? A prospective 30-year follow-up. *Archives of Sexual Behavior, 39*(1), 63-74. doi: 10.1007/s10508-008-9449-3

Winfield, I., George, L. K., Swartz, M., & Blazer, D. G. (1990). Sexual assault and psychiatric disorders among a community sample of women. *The American Journal of Psychiatry, 147*(3), 335-341. doi: 10.1176/ajp.147.3.335

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Tags: sexuality, sex-differences, trauma, sexual-assault
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# Question
Title: Is "Incremental learning" pseudo-science?
I've recently come across the following article: http://www.super-memory.com/help/il\_full.htm The author makes the claim that "Incremental learning" is the best way of learning and goes as far as to claim that the problem of "forgetting" is nearly completely avoided. For me the whole thing just sounds like advertising for the program "SuperMemo" but apparently the author Piotr Woźniak holds a PhD and is in fact a researcher. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piotr\_Wo%C5%BAniak\_(researcher) Is he a known fraud or is the information presented a mainstream opinion shared by psychologists? Thanks in advance

# Answer
The merits of any given body of work is best assessed by looking at it, regardless of whether you want to label it as 'pseudoscientific' or not based on that judgement.

Unfortunately, this proved to be quite troublesome for the SuperMemo application, which makes some pretty strong claims that require justification to be considered academic. For example:

> Incremental learning is the fastest and the most comprehensive way of learning available to students at the moment of writing (2013).
>
> Incremental learning easily ensures 95% recall of top-priority learning material for lifetime

To be considered scientific, there would have to be publicly accessible publications backing up those claims. I found the following list of 50 publications in reference to SuperMemo. But, I could only find the following **4 publications out of the 50 listed** on Google Scholar:

* A hypothetical model of processes involved in the release of norepinephrine in the adrenergic synapse. (Gorzelańczyk & Woźniak, 1991): cited by 2; the abstract seems irrelevant to the claims made
* The educational technology of repetition spacing in information systems development. (Wozniak & Abramowicz, 1997): 4 references, all self-citations; no tracked citations on Scholar; furthermore, listed twice in the list of 50 publications
* SuperMemo (Wharton, 1994): a 5-page software review, representing a subjective case study at best (*"As a new German student, I have been using SuperMemo ..."*); no tracked citations
* Optimization of repetition spacing in the practice of learning. (Wozniak & Gorzelanczyk, 1994): 4-pager, 7 references, **cited by 79**

The fact that the majority of these publications are not available indicates these were not made 'archival' by the conferences/journals they were presented at. This gives a first poor assessment of the adequacy of this presented work. Rigorous, peer-reviewed, work would be accessible and cited by subsequent research.

The last paper (4 page 'short communication') with 79 citations presents:

> A universal formula for computing inter-repetition intervals in paired-associate learning has been determined for the knowledge retention level of 95%. It is claimed that the formula could be used in the practice of learning for a wide range of subjects, regardless individual learner's capacity.

The method they employed to evaluate their algorithm:

> The subjects taking part in the experiment were 7 unpaid volunteers, students of computer science at the Technical University of Poznan. In the period of 18 months, they memorized and repeated altogether over 35000 items of their choice (the items had the form of Polish-English word pairs).

I'll leave it up to you to decide whether or not you agree with their conclusion:

> The obtained results unequivocally indicate the superiority of progressive repetition spacing over massed or distributed spacing and may be used in practice of learning in order to minimize time necessary for memorization and retention of the learned material.

Or, alternatively, follow-up on the 79 citations to see how experts in the field formulate the work. One example (Lindsey et al., 2014), emphasis mine:

> **Outside the academic literature**, two traditional adaptive-scheduling techniques have attracted a degree of popular interest: the Leitner (1972) system and SuperMemo (Wozniak & Gorzelanczyk, 1994).

Interestingly, Wozniak seemed to have been a reviewer on that paper!

## Conclusion

While the SuperMemo application does seem to have made a noticeable commercial impact, of which the Wired article "Want to remember everything you'll ever learn? Surrender to this algorithm" and citations to the one paper is a good indication, it does not seem to be embedded in rigorous published scientific research.

This does not necessarily make the application 'pseudoscientific' as it might still base itself or correspond to 'proper science', *but*, **the way the website represents itself as scientific is grossly overstated**. I would not place much trust in anything written there.

<sub> Wozniak, P. A., & Abramowicz, W. (1997). The educational technology of repetition spacing in information systems development. In Systems Development Methods for the Next Century (pp. 341-344). Springer, Boston, MA.
Gorzelańczyk, E. J., & Woźniak, P. (1991). A hypothetical model of processes involved in the release of norepinephrine in the adrenergic synapse. BioSystems, 25(4), 275-281.
Wharton C. (1994). SuperMemo. CALICO Journal Vol. 12, No. 1 (Fall 1994), pp. 66-70
Wozniak, P. A., & Gorzelanczyk, E. J. (1994). Optimization of repetition spacing in the practice of learning. Acta neurobiologiae experimentalis, 54, 59-59.
Lindsey, R. V., Shroyer, J. D., Pashler, H., & Mozer, M. C. (2014). Improving students’ long-term knowledge retention through personalized review. Psychological science, 25(3), 639-647. </sub>
> 4 votes

# Answer
WIRED, has an article just about him and his lifestyle: Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

An anecdote: I built a flashcard deck for Anki program. From my observation Anki is one of the leading software in the market for spaced repetition software. The program's algorithm is based on SuperMemo 2 algorithm..

So we have these names: WIRED, Anki, spaced repetition. They seem to converge to one conclusion.
> 0 votes

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Tags: learning
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# Question
Title: Are there any tests for one's belief or philosophy?
I know of the varying types of personality tests and I find them interesting (specifically HEXACO due to it having multiple facets to expand its 6 main factors and I believe it is open-source or free to use to some extent). I was wondering if there exists any psychological tests that determine one's beliefs or philosophy?

I know of the Dark Triad, but that's still more personality than belief. The difference I am trying to define is that personality tests seem to me to state what a person does or how they act, but not necessarily attempt to define their reasoning or motives. I believe a psychological belief test could be interesting, and/or (if different) a test of how one's personal philosophy is correlated to academic philosophies, meaning the well-established and studied philosophies.

Any resources and thoughts are welcomed here.

---

Psychological profiling may accomplish to some extent what I am looking for, but I am uncertain. These may help reveal one's motivations to some degree, which is still something useful.

# Answer
The confidence in one's own ability to achieve intended results is assessed by tests on **self-efficacy**

Self-efficacy or personal efficacy is a dimension developed by Bandura (1997) in his *social cognitive theory*.

He also developed some tests which assess the sefl-efficacy in many situations:

* Academic self-efficacy
* Self-efficacy to regulate eating habits
* Driving self-efficacy
* Problem solving self- efficacy
* Teacher self-efficacy

And a great deal more scales. In fact *"the efficacy belief system is not a global trait but a differentiated set of self-beliefs linked to distinct realms of functioning"* (Bandura, 1997) . Multidomain measures reveal the patterning and degree of generality of people’s sense of personal efficacy.

(I wish to have helped you)

**REFERENCES**
> 1 votes

# Answer
I think what we call ideologies may be too varied across time and locations to capture in a questionnaire format. If you go one level more specific, to something like support of religion, free market, or moral situations, these may be more reliably and universally measurable.

One feature that feels universal is what constitutes a moral violation. Schwartz, Haidt, and others have worked in this area. One proposal is Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral\_foundations\_theory. I've published in this area and I think it's a valuable perspective. Here's one place you can take the test: https://www.idrlabs.com/morality/6/test.php

However, MFT has been criticized recently for not being sufficiently coherent or reliable, eg. https://behavioralscientist.org/whats-wrong-with-moral-foundations-theory-and-how-to-get-moral-psychology-right/ discussion at https://twitter.com/Oliver\_S\_Curry/status/1110876328507645952
> 1 votes

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Tags: reference-request, measurement, motivation, test, statistics
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# Question
Title: When does the brain stem appear in humans?
When does the brain stem appear in humans?

The following article states:

> Once the neural tube closes, at around week 6 or week 7 of pregnancy, it curves and bulges into three sections, commonly known as the forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain. Just to the rear of the hindbrain sits the part that will soon turn into your baby's spinal cord. Soon, these areas bubble into those five different regions of the brain that we're most familiar with: the cerebrum, cerebellum, brain stem, pituitary gland and the hypothalamus.

How "soon" after 6 - 7 weeks is this soon the article talks about? When does the brain stem appear in humans?

Fetal Brain Development

# Answer
> 2 votes
I'm not sure this question is answerable at that specificity. There isn't a discrete point in time where the cells are definitively a brain stem rather than a precursor structure such the bulge mentioned above. One could identify a set of a cells in earlier structures that eventually are located in the adult area we call the brain stem, but that doesn't mean at the point those cells are identifiable that they are IN the brain stem during development.

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Tags: neurophysiology, brain-development
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# Question
Title: Ethics of observing someone doing something with substantial risk
This question about someone who wants to be put into an isolation chamber got me thinking about the ethics involved in observing someone doing something risky. If a *participant* approaches you about doing something dangerous, possibly with a high likelihood of death or permanent injury, and wants you to document it as an N-of-1 case study, are you ethically allowed to? For example, a terminally ill patient wants to expose themselves to high doses of a drug that may cure them, but will likely severely impair their cognitive function, lead and wants you to document their cognitive decline. How does one describe this to an IRB? Is it the same as studies of actively using addicts?

# Answer
> 0 votes
Institutional Review Boards (IRBS) are both legal and practical gatekeepers for researchers, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional\_review\_board. Practically, a social scientist may not be able to publish or receive funding support if their research is not approved. Legally, they also provide some cover. However, they are not guarantors of being ethical, because there is not universal agreement about what is ethical. So perhaps we could ask WHO would consider it more ethical if such a study were approved by an IRB compared to not?

From my experience both inside and outside of hospitals managing IRB submissions, such a study is unlikely to be approved. However, some might still consider it ethical, and there's no practical barrier to observing it. One important feature here is whether the researcher designed, encouraged, or administers the treatment. Researchers are not prohibited from observing harmful behaviors in others, in general.

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Tags: ethics
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title: Why does campfire lighting look creepy?

text:
# Question
Title: Why does campfire lighting look creepy?
Various photography lighting guides state that when light is positioned **above** a face it looks natural, but when positioned **below** a person it looks unnatural or even "creepy".

This is sometimes used deliberately in movies to evoke fear.

The universal principles of design say that this is because we evolved on planet earth with a single sun, which is always above us.

But there are plenty of natural situations where light could come from under us. Such as being reflected off the ground, snow, or water, or just sitting around a warm campfire.

I'm just curious if there are any known psychological reasons why lighting under a face might look unnatural or "creepy"? Or could it be that it's such a staple of horror movies that we're primed to perceive it that way?

# Answer
> 3 votes
There are situations as you mentioned where light can be from below, but they are extremely rare in our evolutionary past. Fire is quite recent: remove that one. Reflections from water or snow would require very strong light from above, so those are essentially removed as well. I think the creepiness comes from the unfamiliarity. Also see the Uncanny Valley, which describes similar feelings in response to near-human representations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny\_valley

A good test would be with non-human animals. Do they find bottom-lit faces fear-inducing?

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Tags: perception, emotion, fear
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# Question
Title: How can a human carry out a mass shooting whilst remaining calm?
In the wake of the horrific terrorist attack in Christchurch New Zealand, it became known that the shooter had live streamed 17 minutes of his rampage to Facebook. In the video, of which I have only watched about 15 seconds from the point of the first shot being fired, the shooter can be seen extremely calmly carrying out his attack.

My question to the people here is, what is the root cause of a human being such as the shooter, being able to carry out such inhumane, disgusting, horrifying and downright evil acts whilst remaining so chillingly calm?

As someone with very little to no knowledge or experience with the relevant psychological literature, I have to ask, is this shooter a straight up psychopath? Surely the people who carry out such attacks have had some prior brain damage or genetic mental condition?

# Answer
> -1 votes
There may be less apparent contradiction if the shooter doesn't consider those behaviors as immoral, disgusting, etc. Consider a soldier in wartime: they might sometimes appear calm as well.

If you look at the stated justifications for mass shootings, they often have a specific purpose and apparently see moral reasons for their actions. Broadly speaking, people differ widely in what they consider ethical or moral. One person's virtue is another's sin. There are shared features between many ethical traditions, such as a prohibition against murder, but murder and war remain common. There is no need for a specific physiological fault like a brain injury or a particular genetic variant for humans to disagree wildly on what actions are appropriate. It's famously difficult to sympathize with the moral intuitions of other people; see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral\_foundations\_theory. Instead of universal reasons, we generally have the strong feeling that something is right or wrong, and then we construct reasons.

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Tags: abnormal-psychology, developmental-psychology
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# Question
Title: Is there a term for simulated irrationality?
When 2 rational people want to accomplish their goals, they'll get compromise by meeting their goals halfway. But if one of them seems irrational, his opponent will go much farther in his concessions since he knows there's the risk of him burning everything to the ground.

**Therefore, it can be advantegous to seem irrational or insane. Is there a term for behaving in such a manner on purpose?**

# Answer
> 5 votes
I don't think there's an official term for this kind of bluffing specifically, that's widely used. But Nixon's approach to the Soviet Union, to act in an exaggerated irrational manner to deter them from provoking the US, is sometimes referred to as the "Madman Strategy".

# Answer
> 1 votes
Indeed in the game of chicken appearing "insane" is actually a good strategy

> Pre-commitment
>
> One tactic in the game is for one party to signal their intentions convincingly before the game begins. For example, if one party were to ostentatiously disable their steering wheel just before the match, the other party would be compelled to swerve.\[12\] This shows that, in some circumstances, reducing one's own options can be a good strategy.

Pre-commitment is part of a larger class of "wastefully costly" signals.

However the "madman strategy" (linked from another answer) is not a simple game with predetermined payoffs like the chicken game. Rather, the example given there uses prisoner's dilemma as the *initial* game. But what it is actually saying with the -100 part is that since, in reality, the (negative) payoff for war is not known, a "madman" bluff transforms the prisoner's dilemma game into a game of chicken! (Compare the tables.)

> The essential difference between these two games is that in the prisoner's dilemma, the Cooperate strategy is dominated, whereas in Chicken the equivalent move is not dominated since the outcome payoffs when the opponent plays the more escalated move (Straight in place of Defect) are reversed.

So basically the "madman strategy" is a "meta-game" trying to induce the opponent to think it's playing a different game. N.B.: after asking on econ.SE, the general term is Bayesian game. And more precisely, a signalling game. The best illustration related to your question is the so-called "reputation game" (a sub-type of signalling game):

> The sender can be one of two types: Sane or Crazy. A sane sender can send one of two messages: Prey and Accommodate. A crazy sender can only Prey. The receiver can do one of two actions: Stay or Exit. Apriori, the sender has probability *p* to be Sane and 1-*p* to be Crazy. \[The payoff table is below\]

The a priori numerical constraints are assumed to be

* For the Sane sender, the ordering (his utility function) is M1\>D1\>P1, so the successful "faking mad" monopoly choice has higher payoff (if successful, i.e. if receiver exits) than a cooperative duopoly (D1) which in turn is higher still than the payoff for just "faking mad". (The last is usually a negative number in reality, i.e. a cost, but this assumption is not strictly necessary, it just needs to be worse/less than the other two aforementioned payoffs.)
* For the receiver, D2\>0\>P2, so the message-receiving player has higher payoff if it holds his nerves (and pulls off a "compromise" duopoly) rather than caving in and exiting.

> If preying is costly for a sane sender (D1+D1=P1+M1), they will accommodate and there will be a unique separating PBE \[perfect Bayesian equilibrium\]: the receiver will stay after Accommodate and exit after Prey.
>
> A separating \[perfect Bayesian\] equilibrium is an equilibrium where senders with different types always choose different messages. This means that the sender's message always reveals the sender's type, so the receiver's beliefs become deterministic after seeing the message.
>
> If preying is not too costly for a sane sender (D1+D1 is less than P1+M1), and it is harmful for the receiver (*p* D2 + (1-*p*) P2 ≤ 0), the sender will prey and there will be a unique pooling PBE: again the receiver will stay after Accommodate and exit after Prey. Here, the sender is willing to lose some value by preying in the first period, in order to build a reputation of a predatory firm, and convince the receiver to exit.
>
> A pooling \[perfect Bayesian\] equilibrium is an equilibrium where senders with different types all choose the same message. This means that the sender's message does not give any information to the receiver, so the receiver's beliefs are not updated after seeing the message.

The latter is the "madman strategy". It takes specific payoff constraints and player-type initial distribution to be the optimal strategy even for the Sane type. And for completeness, there's one more case:

> If preying is not costly for the sender nor harmful for the receiver, there will not be a PBE in pure strategies. There will be a unique PBE in mixed strategies - both the sender and the receiver will randomize between their two actions.

The latter case, i.e. occasional (non-permanent) use a of "madman strategy" is actually more related to strategic ambiguity, as are all mixed strategies. I'm handwaving the details on the latter here; strategic ambiguity actually has a more precise meaning, withholding information in order to create game-shifting a situation similar to "playing madman", but without explicitly sending unambiguous "crazy" messages:

> strategic ambiguity can be used by a mediator to achieve cooperation in situations similar to the prisoners’ dilemma. In this game a mediator is able to create ambiguity about the reward in case of unilateral defection. If he creates enough ambiguity, both prisoners are afraid of punishment and prefer to cooperate. The outcome thus reached is even Pareto–improving. A remarkable consequence \[...\] is that the strategic use of ambiguity allows to reach equilibria that are not Nash equilibria in the original game \[...\].

Under the assumption that receivers are ambiguity-averse, sending ambiguous messages can thus obtain a similar effect to "playing madman"... and is much more "appearances saving". Although strategic ambiguity has been formalized much more recently in game theory than the explicit "madman strategy", diplomats have been using the former for probably as long as they have been using the more naked "playing madman" strategy.

# Answer
> 0 votes
I like the theory put forward of *madman strategy* but I would say that if someone is co-operative with an irrational person, they are agreeing with parts of the irrational person's thinking. What you seem to be asking about to me is where a "rational" person goes with the irrational behaviour to prevent further irrational behaviour which to a degree would be irrational to me in itself :-/

I would like to add a possibly more rational alternative to these that others have put forward, whereby there could actually be **concessionary behaviour** at play.

A rational person may concede to tactically allow the irrational behaviour, maybe on a temporary basis, whilst trying to convince the irrational person(s) that their behaviour is irrational.

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Tags: terminology, rationality, game-theory
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# Question
Title: Why is positive semi definiteness a sufficient condition for Lyapunov stability of the Hopfield networks?
For a given Hopfeild network : $\tau\frac{dx}{dt} = -x + f(Wx + b) $

a general Lyapunov stability function for Hopfeild networks is :

$L(x) = -\frac{1}{2}x^TWx + b^Tx + F(x)$

where $F(x) = \int^{x} f^{-1}(y)dy$

In the case of linear networks, $f(x) = x$, the Lyapunov function becomes:

$L(x) = \frac{1}{2}x^T(I - W)x + b^Tx$

It is asserted that if $(I-W)$ is positive semi definite, then the $L(x)$ is the Lyapunov function and the system is stable. Why is that a sufficient condition?

# Answer
The fact that it's a Lyapunov function means that $$ \frac{dL}{dt} = \frac{\partial L}{\partial x} \cdot \frac{dx}{dt} \leq 0 $$ If $I-W$ is positive semidefinite, $L$ is bounded from below by $-\frac{1}{2} b^T (I-W)^{-1} b $. This means that the network will end up in a minimum of $L$ and cannot keep moving for ever.
> 1 votes

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Tags: theoretical-neuroscience
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# Question
Title: Getting upset from the creation of your own imagination
Lets say I got angry at someone who did/said something wrong. Even after this angry interaction with this person is finished, I noticed I continue to express my negative reaction in my head creating some imaginary situation where this specific person is doing/saying something wrong (which they didn't do/say in real life; it's totally in my head, a creation of my negative imagination). It wastes my time, mental energy, breaks my focus/concentration at productive work, and definitely it's long term effect on my mental health cannot be good.

I just wanted to know -
\- Is this just me, or this happens to other people too?
\- What this problem/issue is known as (just so I can do a little more research online)?

# Answer
> 0 votes
Yes, this is a common experience. I often see people walking around gesturing and talking quietly but intensely to themselves; amusing that we not only have these imaginary conversations, but can hardly resist moving our faces and bodies in concert with those thoughts. Broadly speaking, humans often engage in counterfactual reasoning: imagining things that aren't. This has been proposed as one of the most unique features of human cognition relative to other animals.

A key related concept is rumination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumination\_(psychology) , which are negative and often repeated thoughts without new insight.

This is also related to mindfulness—awareness of what is currently happening—which is a tool to recognize when one gets lost in thought. It is not trivial just to realize that it is thought, rather than something that is actually happening.

Also see the psychology term https://psychcentral.com/lib/what-is-catastrophizing/ : "Catastrophizing is an irrational thought a lot of us have in believing that something is far worse than it actually is. Catastrophizing can generally can take two different forms: making a catastrophe out of a current situation, and imagining making a catastrophe out of a future situation."

# Answer
> 1 votes
Generally this is known as rumination. I don't know if there has been a more specific name for the specific type you mention, but it has been studied somewhat:

> Certain characteristics of rumination, such as compulsion to continue ruminating, occurrence of unproductive thoughts, and "why" and **"what if" type questions**, as well as negative emotions before and after rumination, were significantly associated with PTSD, concurrently and prospectively. These characteristics explained significantly more variance in PTSD severity than the mere presence of rumination, thereby indicating that not all ways of ruminative thinking are equally maladaptive.

A problem in this area is that there's not an agreed definition of rumination, as the intro the Wikipedia article on the topic says.

Alternatively, one can also call persistent "what if" thinking just worry. In fact there are some older papers discussing "what if" thinking under worry alone.

> The worrier is likely to engage in a series of 'What if...' self-statements. For example, 'What if I fail? My parents might shut off my funding, and I'll have to leave school. What if I can't get a job?.., etc.' There may be some attempted solutions offered (e.g. 'I'11 plead with my folks to continue supporting me'), but these will be followed by further 'What if... ' statements (e.g. 'What if they don't listen to me? What if they are too angry to listen to reason?'). This kind of mental behavior may have very different consequences for the worrier than for someone else who is anxious about some upcoming event but does not engage in worrisome activity. Data do exist that indicate that cognitive avoidance can maintain anxiety (Borkovec, 1974) and catastrophizing self-statements can worsen anxiety (e.g. Grayson and Borkovec, 1978), both despite repeated exposure to the feared stimulus. Although the stated function of worry by the worrier is to attempt to anticipate and cope with an uncertain future, the actual functional effect may be the maintenance of anxiety and its continued and frequent elicitation prior to actual outcomes.

More recent research trying to separate worry from rumination has generally proposed that time orientation (future or past) should be distinguishing factor:

> Several researchers have investigated the content of worry and rumination to study the differences between both processes. The only stable difference that has been consistently found pertains to the temporal orientation (Papageorgiou & Wells, 1999; Watkins, 2004; Watkins, Moulds, & Mackintosh, 2005); whereas worry is predominantly focused on the future, rumination is predominantly focused on the past.

In my opinion, it's a bit of grey area whether pondering about what someone has said in the past is entirely past-oriented or it if it may have a future-oriented component as well. E.g. you may worry that they'll do something else related to the past discussion like come back to you and continue it. Counterfactual thinking as to what they could have said (but didn't say) is ruminative if you don't really think they might come back and say (more) to you. On the other hand, if you project that they may do so (and you're anticipating responses to a future conversation), it could just as well be considered a worry.

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, abnormal-psychology, self-control
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# Question
Title: What is the psychology behind blind spots? Why do we fail to see, what others see so clearly about us?
It’s absolutely imperative to identify our blind spots. I believe that they are impediment for one to reach his full potential. But how does one, see his blind spot - #oxymoron? What is the psychology behind it?

# Answer
> 4 votes
What you are talking about is something psychologists Joseph Luft (1916–2014) and Harrington Ingham (1916–1995) looked at in 1955. They developed a 4-pane window visualisation called the Johari Window (named by combining the first parts of their first names).

The model is also denoted as feedback/disclosure model of self-awareness (Luft, J., & Ingham, 1961). Each window pane is an arena within which holds information about you. This is used primarily in self-help groups and corporate settings as a heuristic exercise, however, it is increasingly being used elsewhere such as in clinical supervision as a useful tool to develop self awareness and reflection (Halpern, 2009; Beach, 1982).

## Example of Johari Window

As an example, when you get a job, your co-workers know a little about you and in this context there will be more information about you in the unknown and hidden arenas. The open arena will have little information. As the others don’t know much about you the blind spot also has little information.

**In order for you to know what is in each arena, you MUST be:**

* **open and honest with yourself**
* **open to honest feedback from others**

As more knowledge about you is gathered, the relevant arena gets filled with that knowledge. Let's say your co-workers see you as someone who doesn't want to talk to them, yet you see yourself as approachable. The fact that you are seen that way will be in your blind spot.

## Know what is in your blind spot

In order to know what is in your blind spot (as with other arenas), you need to seek for it through communication with your co-workers. You could ask them for their views on you, allowing them to be open and honest.

## What is in your hidden arena

The same goes with the hidden arena. Your co-workers will only know what you disclose or reveal unknowingly. You don't need to reveal deep secrets you don't want them to know, but to reduce the amount in the hidden arena, you need to disclose what you wish them to know.

### This can have a benefit to you.

As people know more, they understand you more. What is seen as you being standoffish may not be quite how they see it. Maybe you are quiet because you just lost a close friend or relative. They may see it differently once they know.

## How do I find out what is totally unknown (Unknown Arena)

Well that is the trickier one. You don't know what is there and neither does anyone else. The only way you are going to know is by reflection on what you know in the other arenas. Clinical supervision is one place where your thoughts and feelings about the work you have done can help with this. Maybe you have hidden prejudices you were not aware of. There may have been hints of it in your blind spot or hidden arena. Listening to what others have said is in your blindspot along with your thoughts and feelings will bring them out into your awareness.

## Blind spot analysis

What is said in the Wikipedia article @Fizz linked in the comments seems to say, in a roundabout way, the same as what I said in my answer. Just in a different way. You need to holistically look at your environment and examine it in order to find your blind spots.

## References

Beach, E. K. (1982). Johari's window as a framework for needs assessment. *The Journal of Continuing Education in Nursing, 13*(3), 28-32. doi: 10.3928/0022-0124-19820501-07

Halpern, H. (2009). Supervision and the Johari window: a framework for asking questions. *Education for Primary Care, 20*(1), 10-14. doi: 10.1080/14739879.2009.11493757

Luft, J., & Ingham, H. (1961). The johari window. *Human relations training news, 5*(1), 6-7. Receivable from: http://www.richerexperiences.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Johari-Window.pdf

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Tags: social-psychology, bias, consciousness, metacognition
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# Question
Title: Is there consciouness when a person is sleeping and not dreaming?
According to

Consciouness

> Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness or of being aware of an external object or something within oneself.

I suppose dreaming qualifies as "being aware of an external object or something within oneself". But what about sleeping without dreaming. Is there supposedly consciousness in that state?

# Answer
According to Giulio Tononi,"consciousness is what goes away when you fall into a dreamless sleep,” he explained that "once a person goes into dreamless sleep, there is no experience, no perception of surroundings or the environment; there are no memories of the past or the future or even the present. It is thus at this point that everything disappears, which corresponds to consciousness “going away.”" \[1\] You can look up his integrated information theory of consciousness \[2\]

1. Tononi G, Edelman GM: Consciousness and complexity. Science. 1998, 282 (5395): 1846-1851. 10.1126/science.282.5395.1846.
2. Tononi, G. (2011). The integrated information theory of consciousness: an updated account. Archives italiennes de biologie, 150(2/3), 56-90.
> 1 votes

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Tags: sleep, consciousness, dreams
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# Question
Title: Open data for behavioral psychology experiment?
I have a model I'd like to compare to the Drift Diffusion model, which is commonly used to model response times and error rates in two-alternative forced-choice tasks. Lots of publications use the random dot motion task like this \[1\] or this \[2\] and collect response-time data.

My question is - does anyone know of publicly available response time datasets that I could use for model comparison?

\[1\] https://neuronaldynamics.epfl.ch/online/Ch16.S1.html

\[2\] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Random-dot-motion-task-a-An-array-of-dots-is-moving-into-random-directions-with-a\_fig2\_226279128

# Answer
> 2 votes
There are some example data sets associated with these tutorials https://osf.io/pbwx8/

See 'get\_all\_data.R' in the tutorial subdirectory.

You might also be interested in some of the surrounding discussion, which is all about the process of comparing new models with the existing ones.

Hope this helps!

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Tags: experimental-psychology, cognitive-modeling, data
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# Question
Title: Is there a technical term for "fear of the unknown"?
I'm writing paper about climate change and its economic impacts on society. Is there a generally accepted technical term for "fear of the unknown" in psychology?

# Answer
The closest formal term I'm aware of is **Xenophobia** but that term has been primarily used to describe a fear or dislike of foreign people, so I wouldn't use it in any context other than that.

I would simply use the explicit phrase **fear of the unknown**; general fears are often referred to in an explicit manner like that. "Fear of the unknown" written out as such is commonly used in articles as are "fear of death" etc. While phrases like "arachnophobia" are common in popular use, phobias are really only *irrational and extreme* fears; as such an X-phobia term is often inappropriate when not discussing irrational, specific fears on an individual basis.
> 7 votes

# Answer
"Ambiguity aversion" aka "uncertainty aversion" has been studied more recently in game theory. This is not exactly "fear", but it's something what's formalizable.

> a preference for known risks over unknown risks. An ambiguity-averse individual would rather choose an alternative where the probability distribution of the outcomes is known over one where the probabilities are unknown. \[...\]
>
> The distinction between ambiguity aversion and risk aversion is important but subtle. Risk aversion comes from a situation where a probability can be assigned to each possible outcome of a situation and it is defined by the preference between a risky alternative and its expected value. Ambiguity aversion applies to a situation when the probabilities of outcomes are unknown (Epstein 1999) and it is defined through the preference between risky and ambiguous alternatives, after controlling for preferences over risk.
>
> Using the traditional two-urn Ellsberg choice, urn A contains 50 red balls and 50 blue balls while urn B contains 100 total balls (either red or blue) but the number of each is unknown. An individual who prefers a certain payoff strictly smaller than $10 over a bet that pays \\$20 if the color of a ball drawn from urn A is guessed correctly and \\$0 otherwise is said to be risk averse but nothing can be said about her preferences over ambiguity. On the other hand, an individual who strictly prefers that same bet if the ball is drawn from urn A over the case where the ball is drawn from urn B is said to be ambiguity averse but not necessarily risk averse.

And to relate this notion to empirical psychology, or at least to behavioral economics:

> People shy away from processes about which they think they have insufficient information (Frisch and Baron 1988).
>
> This happens in particular if an alternative process with a higher perceived informational content is available (Chow and Sarin 2001; Fox and Tversky 1995; Fox and Weber 2002). The effect appears to be particularly strong when somebody with a higher knowledge of the outcome generating process may serve as a comparison (Heath and Tversky 1991; Taylor 1995) or observes the decision (Chow and Sarin 2002).
>
> A preference for the more informative process may be explained by fear of negative evaluation, which is driven by the expectation that one’s actions or judgments may be difficult to justify in front of others. When the audience’s views on an issue are unknown and no prior commitment to one course of action exists, people have been found to make the decision which they deem most easily justifiable to others rather than the one that is intrinsically optimal (Shafir et al. 1993; Simonson 1989; Lerner and Tetlock 1999). In this way they minimize the risk of being judged negatively by others on their quality as decision makers.
>
> Choosing the unfamiliar process entailed by the ambiguous urn may lead to embarrassment if a losing outcome should obtain (Ellsberg 1963; Fellner 1961; Heath and Tversky 1991; Roberts 1963; Tetlock 1991; Toda and Shuford 1965). The risky prospect is perceived as more justifiable than the ambiguous one because potentially available probabilistic information is missing from the ambiguous urn (Frisch and Baron 1988). This is consistent with people’s preference for betting on future events rather than on past events, given that information about past events is potentially available whereas the future has yet to materialize (Brun and Teigen 1990; Rothbart and Snyder 1970). It is also consistent with people’s unwillingness to act on the basis of ambiguous information (van Dijk and Zeelenberg 2003).
>
> A decision based on more information is generally perceived as better (Tetlock and Boettger 1989), and it has been shown that a risky prospect is generally considered preferable to an ambiguous one by a majority of people (Keren and Gerritsen 1999). Kocher and Trautmann (2007) find that people correctly anticipate these negative attitudes towards ambiguity. If a bad outcome were to result from a prospect about which an agent had comparatively little knowledge, her failure may be blamed on her incompetence or ‘uninformed’ choice (Baron and Hershey 1988). A bad outcome resulting from a risky prospect, on the other hand, cannot be attributed to poor judgment. All possible information about the risky prospect was known, and a failure is simply bad luck (Heath and Tversky 1991; Toda and Shuford 1965).

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Compare with:

> Fear of the unknown (FOTU) will be defined herein as, “an individual’s propensity to experience fear caused by the perceived absence of information at any level of consciousness or point of processing”; relatedly, intolerance of uncertainty (IU) will be defined as, “an individual’s dispositional incapacity to endure the aversive response triggered by the perceived absence of salient, key, or sufficient information, and sustained by the associated perception of uncertainty.” \[...\]
>
> Factorially distinct
>
> Research exploring FOTU, as reflected by IU, as factorially independent from other constructs has been conducted with the Intolerance of Uncertainty short form (i.e., IUS-12; Carleton, Norton et al., 2007). The available results have provided robust support that FOTU is factorially distinct. The first such study supporting factorial independence was conducted by (Carleton, Sharpe et al., 2007) using undergraduate data. There have been two subsequent publications investigating different aspects of factorial independence for FOTU (Carleton, Thibodeau, Osborne, & Asmundson, 2012; Carleton, Thibodeau et al., 2014). The publications used a large sample of undergraduates and community members who provided responses to measures of anxiety sensitivity, fear of injury or illness, fear of negative evaluation, fear of pain, and FOTU as measured by IU; nevertheless, independent replications appear well-warranted.

I would not bet the claim to factorial distinctiveness holds because of the limited research, but at least you can refer to FOTU as such, although frankly it seems to based on IU rather than an experiment showing actual fear. Maybe some neuroimaging would help...

TLDR: I think intolerance/aversion to "the unknown" or more precisely to uncertainty/ambiguity is a more established concept than a fear of the same.
> 2 votes

# Answer
There is agnosiophobia, which is the **fear of not knowing**, (the opposite being gnosiophobia**fear of knowledge/knowing**).

There is also agnostophobia which is **fear of the unknown**.
> 2 votes

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Tags: terminology, emotion
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# Question
Title: Would a diagnosis from a layman be legitimate if it follows the definition of the disorder?
Assuming a layman with no formal training (person A) says "person B has disorder X". A should not make such diagnosis because they don't have the training. But if A does that because it fits the definition, then wouldn't their conclusion be correct? For example, I know that for a person to have borderline personality disorder they need to have at least 5 of 9 criteria. So if B does have that, then would A be fine to conclude that B has that disorder, in spite of the fact that A isn't trained?

# Answer
> 3 votes
Here are some basics on the diagnostic process:

> There are two main sources of disagreement in assessing psychiatric disorder or, as Feinstein (1985) wrote, 'two different phases of the observational process'. First, in the assessment of psychopathology; to transform ' the observed phenomena into certain raw elements of descriptive data'. Second, disagreement arises from the combining of detected psychopathology to yield diagnoses;' In the second phase, these raw descriptive elements are converted into a category of final expression' (Feinstein, 1985). Efforts have been made to standardize both these areas. \[...\]

And if this needs a quote, here's the obvious fact:

> Lay interviewers are unable to exercise expert clinical judgements in making decisions about the presence or absence of symptoms. \[...\]
>
> There are some particular problems in attempting to standardize assessments of psychiatric disorder. Lack of insight into mental illness, a problem when assessing people with psychotic illness especially, can affect responses to questions. The extreme example is the deluded patient who will say there is nothing wrong. In the training of a clinical psychiatrist much stress is put on obtaining historical details from informants other than the patient because of clinical evidence that those with severe mental illness can be misleading historians. For example, a subject with a delusion of persecution, may state that neighbours are deliberately making loud noises, or moving furniture in order to annoy. Such statements would lead most clinicians to investigate further by means of informants, though others might rely purely on clinical impressions from an interview. Attempts to standardize assessments of psychosis are more difficult and of a different nature from the problems of standardizing minor psychiatric disorder when insight is rarely impaired to an extent which affects the validity of self-report. A similar problem arises when attempting to standardize assessments of conversion hysteria or other physical disorders with a presumed psychological aetiology.

It's not a slam dunk that standazing the interviewing process will eliminate experience as a factor, for example

> There are also concerns that lay interviewers are an important source of bias when using the PSE. Lay interviewers tend to score more highly than psychiatrists and so estimate a higher prevalence of psychiatric disorder. For example, Sturt et al. (1981) found that the mean PSE scores for lay interviewers were nearly 30% higher (4-12 v. 3-20) than those of the psychiatrically trained interviewers. Trends in a similar direction and of a similar magnitude have also been described by Rodgers & Mann (1986), Wing et al. (1977) and Cooper et al. (1977).

PSE is the former name of SCAN more or less the WHO-equivalent of the more commonly used SCID. Both are semi-structured interviews in which open-ended questions may be asked, but the SCID allows more freedom, including skips and completely novel questions from the interviewer.

With this long preamble, there has been a *lot* of research on instruments that would allow a layman to diagnose mental disorders with *some* level of reliability. These include CIS-R, CIDI, and even the older GHQ. These generally have a short\[er\] format and don't try to cover an entire diagnostic manual.

Trying to produce something that would beat the SCID (or even the SCAN) with lay interviewers didn't go well, insofar. Probably the most substantive effort was NIMH's DIS; the combination of its complexity (trying to assess the majority of DSM-III diagnoses) and use of lay interviewers didn't go well. E.g.,

> Eaton et al., (2000) reported on 349 subjects reinterviewed by psychiatrists using the Schedules for Clinical Assessment in Neuropsychiatry (SCAN) following a DIS interview. Results indicated that the DIS missed many cases judged to meet criteria for diagnosis using the SCAN (29% sensitivity), and agreement between the lay versus clinician administered assessments for major depressive disorder was only fair (k=0.20).

(That's frankly understating it fair bit. A kappa of 0.2 for depression is pretty abysmal.)

Besides

> Due to its highly structured format, full administration of the DIS-IV typically requires between 90 and 150 minutes. To shorten administration time, the modular format makes it possible to drop evaluation of disorders that are not of interest in a particular study. Another option is to drop further questioning for a particular disorder once it is clear that the threshold number of symptoms needed for diagnosis will not be met. Although designed for use by nonclinician administrators, training for competent administration of the DIS is necessary. Trainees typically attend a 1-week training program at Washington University, during which they review the DIS manual, listen to didactic presentations about the structure and conventions of the DIS, view videotaped vignettes, complete workbook exercises, and conduct several practice interviews, followed by feedback and review. Additional supervised practice is also recommended.

So even this layman-oriented interview is not exactly an exercise where experience and training don't matter. Basically, the obvious conclusion is that the more fine-grained your diagnostic manual is in terms of disorder classification, the more experience and training is required to use it, even with fairly standardized instruments. (Of course that doesn't even bring into discussion whether all diagnostic categories can even be reliably distinguished, even in the best of circumstances, interviewer-wise.)

There's not a lot of research on the use of SCID by non-professionals because its use this way is discouraged. I did find one paper which did attempt this although the contrast was not with another SCID interview by a clinician, but rather with the consensus lifetime best estimate (CLBE) diagnosis (given by professionals) taken to be "gold standard".

> The overall agreement between the SCID-derived \[they mean SCID applied by a trained non-clinician\] and CLBE \[consensus lifetime best estimate\] DSM-IV diagnoses was very low (kappa 0.18). The SCID tended to diagnose more patients with major depression and fewer with schizophrenia and schizotypal disorder. It was clear that the major source of the diagnostic differences was information variance. A brief, or sometimes monosyllabic response to a question of the structured interview was often short of crucial psychopathological information that might have been elicited in an epistemologically more adequate manner.
>
> Fennig et al showed a high diagnostic concordance for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder between the SCID diagnosis by non-clinician interviewers and the best consensus diagnostic estimates performed by psychiatrists. However, that particular study was limited to patients who were already diagnosed with a psychotic condition. More importantly, the SCID-elicited information also served as the main source of the best consensus estimate. This implies little information variance between psychiatrists and non-psychiatrists, i.e. clinician- and non-clinician raters made their diagnoses upon similar information. Minimizing information variance is exactly one of the cornerstones of the structured interview, but it does not guarantee the quality (validity) of the information.
>
> \[...\]
>
> In conclusion, this study demonstrated a poor diagnostic performance of a structured psychiatric interview conducted by a for-the-purpose trained non-clinician. Such an interview approach cannot be recommended for clinical work, due to a high proportion of misdiagnoses. The high specificity for the diagnosis of schizophrenia (100%) may suggest a limited applicability of such interviews in research with the purpose of a confirmation of an antecedent, clinician’s diagnosis.

What I also find interesting in this study, although not highlighted by its authors, is that the non-clinician categorized correctly all \[CLBD\] cases of major depression (using SCID). The \[sub-\]sample was rather small though (14). On other hand, he misdiagnosed a whole bunch of other \[CLBD\] cases (36=50-14) as being major depression. (High sensitivity, low specificity). That's not too surprising to me because even in primary care depression is generally overdiagnosed "for every 100 unselected cases seen in primary care, there are more false positives (n=15) than either missed (n=10) or identified cases (n=10)"; physician training as well as resorting to reassessments seems to lower this bias.

And that brings me to another comparison/point I wanted to make: if it's hard for primary care physicians to diagnose mental health problems accurately, it's not reasonable to expect laymen to do better (in similar circumstances).

# Answer
> 2 votes
It is tempting to think of medical diagnoses as a recipe. In some cases, it is a lot easier than others to see it that way. It would seem that if you have a broken leg, you have a broken leg. Unfortunately, both physical and mental health diagnoses are rarely that straightforward.

In mental health, when a person comes in complaining of e.g. anxiety, feeling down, prolonged grief, or having an unsatisfying love life, those things are certainly present. But in order to get to the etiology of the presenting concerns takes a good bit of work. Certain diagnoses pop up right away as likely candidates, but then you need to rule them out as there's plenty of overlap. You have to have at least 2 potential conceptualizations of what is going on, and then you rely on your experience and ability to help the patient open up more so you can observe how their mind works, how they see themselves, and how they see the world.

With all that in mind you can formulate what you see as the most likely diagnosis. But even then, as time goes on and you learn more about the patient, you may find yourself changing the diagnosis.

Taking personality disorders in particular, it is actually quite challenging often to differentiate between borderline, dependent, narcissistic, to name a few. You really need a lot of information and a working theory of the person.

# Answer
> -5 votes
As long as the criteria do match, then the diagnosis is correct. Some disorders can have overlap criteria, but a disorder should have a unique set of symptoms. If the symptoms B has match a unique set of a disorder, then we can conclude that B has it, and can conclude that the person making that conclusion correct.

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 I know this answer has no reference, but since no one explicitly confirms or disagrees with what I really ask, so I put it as an answer so everybody can vote on it. (Downvotes are welcomed.)

On the other hand, I think that this is just basic logic/epistemology, so there is no need for reference either.

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Tags: clinical-psychology, training, diagnosis
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# Question
Title: What are the correlations between the facets of honesty-humility in HEXACO personality and the Dark Triad?
I was just reading some of the items in the HEXACO measure of personality. It seems to me that the "honesty-humility" factor is actually more naturally expressed in the opposite way. I.e., about three quarters of the items are reverse scored.

For example, items measuring fairness (i.e., reverse coded) tend to focus on a willingness to engage in corrupt or even criminal behavior to advance your self-interest. Items measuring greed avoidance seem to be focused on concern with social status grounded in superficial things. Modesty items seems more like a measure of narcissism (i.e., believing you are better than others in some essential and vague way). Sincerity seems to have items concerned with a willingness to engage in social manipulation through flattery and guilt.

This got me interested in the correlation between honest-humility and the dark triad: machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy.

**What are the best estimates of the correlation between HEXACO honesty-humility (and facets) with the Dark Triad?**

# Answer
Lee and Ashton (2014) write:

> A few studies have directly examined the relations of the Dark Triad with the Honesty–Humility factor (as operationalized in the HEXACO Personality Inventory \[–Revised\]; HEXACO-PI\[-R\]). These investigations have found the low pole of the Honesty– Humility factor to be essentially identical to the common elementof the Dark Triad variables (Lee & Ashton, 2005; Lee et al., 2013).

One study I found by Aghababaei et al (2014) reports the following correlations for 223 employees using 12 item dark triad and 60-item hexaco.

Of course, this is not the ideal study for facet-level measurement of honesty-humility. Ideally, you'd want more items both for facet-level measurement and measurement of each of the dark triad in order to get a broad and reliable measure. But it should give some idea.

### References

* Lee, K., & Ashton, M. C. (2014). The dark triad, the big five, and the HEXACO model. Personality and Individual Differences, 67, 2-5.
* Aghababaei, N., Mohammadtabar, S., & Saffarinia, M. (2014). Dirty Dozen vs. the H factor: Comparison of the Dark Triad and Honesty–Humility in prosociality, religiosity, and happiness. Personality and Individual Differences, 67, 6-10.
> 2 votes

# Answer
There's now a meta-analysis by Muris et al. (2017) which is a little more fine grained because also takes into account intercorrelation between these three; i.e. Muris et al. report effect sizes both uncorrected and corrected (for shared variance).

There are somewhat obvious (at least for the uncorrected effects) conclusions that the authors draw:

> As anticipated, the relations between honesty-humility and the dark triad traits were all negative and of a moderate to large effect size. Thus, in general, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy are associated with low levels of positive attributes such as truthfulness, honesty, fairness, sincerity, and faithfulness, which is not surprising as each dark trait can be described in terms of the precise opposites of these characteristics (Ashton et al., 2000). As can be seen in Table 3, the negative link with honesty-humility was significantly stronger for Machiavellianism and psychopathy than for narcissism (rs being -.61 and -.54 versus -.41, respectively). This was especially true for the facets of sincerity and fairness, which were more strongly negatively linked to Machiavellianism and psychopathy, but not for the facet of modesty, which was more substantially negatively associated with narcissism. Thus, Machiavellianism and psychopathy are primarily related to dishonesty and falsehood, whereas narcissism is predominantly linked to arrogance and haughtiness (e.g., Aghababaei, Mohammadtabar, & Saffarinia, 2014; Jonason & McCain, 2012).
>
> When controlling for the shared variance among the dark triad traits, we found a similar picture (see lower panel of Table 3). That is, narcissism was positively associated with extraversion and openness, Machiavellianism was negatively related to agreeableness, and psychopathy was negatively linked to agreeableness and conscientiousness. All dark traits remained statistically negatively associated with honesty-humility (with narcissism being more clearly connected to lack of greed avoidance and modesty, and Machiavellianism and psychopathy being more convincingly associated with lack of sincerity and fairness). Yet, controlling for shared variance resulted in attenuated effect sizes (i.e., uncorrected rs between -.41 and -.61 vs. corrected rs between -.26 and -.40). Two new relations attained statistical significance once we controlled for the shared variance among dark triad traits: Machiavellianism was negatively associated with extraversion (r = -.16), while narcissism was positively related to conscientiousness (r = .16). We can only speculate about the meaning of these relations. Thus, the lower levels of extraversion in Machiavellianism fit with the often covert manipulations that are thought to be typical for this trait. The relatively higher levels of conscientiousness that accompany narcissism may serve the effective pursuit of admiration from others.

In the table above they combined 3 different tests for the dark triad (to get a larger sample), which perhaps explains why they didn't extract facets. They have another table like the above but split by test as well (SD3, DD, and the older ODTS itself assembled from 3 tests) for the purposes of discussing differences among these tests, but they don't get into facets. They do note lower correlations with H when using SD3 and DD and conclude that

> these \[newer, briefer\] measures \[SD3, DD\] are not capable of assessing all aspects of the dark triad traits as well as the extended original questionnaires

They also point out that MACH-IV (ODTS) had a small positive correlation with neuroticism, but this becomes negative with SD3, which they could not really explain other than by "employment of different instruments".
> 1 votes

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Tags: measurement, personality, correlation
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