# Question
Title: Scientific name for the phrase: "The first image is the image that stays"
I've always heard about an effect that is entitled: *The first image is the image that stays*. It comes from a translation from a portuguese phrase, I don't know if it's properly translated.

It seems that this is some kind of effect in which the way you present yourself to other person in the first meeting is the one that works as an anchor. It's a very popular saying where I live.

My curiosity is: Does this effect really exists? I mean, has someone studied this effect?

# Answer
There is another common expression: "You never get a second chance to make a first impression."

The stability of first impressions is empirically sound:

> Once formed, first impressions tend to be stable. A review of the literature on the accuracy and impact of first impressions on rater-based assessments found that raters' first impressions are highly correlated with later scores, but it is unclear exactly why. One study tested stability by asking participants to form impressions of people based purely on photographs. Participants' opinions of the people in the photographs did not significantly differ after interacting with that person a month later.

One possible explanation is a well-known and empirically supported cognitive bias called the "anchoring and adjustment heuristic". It seems that people form initial impressions (anchoring), then on subsequent evaluations only make adjustments to the initial impressions, and these adjustments tend to be insufficient. The cause of anchoring is also not well understood.

A more general explanation is "confirmation bias" (anchoring, self-fulfilling prophesy, and the halo effect are all subtypes of this bias), where people form initial impressions, and then confirm their impressions on subsequent evaluations by focusing on information that supports them, and avoiding, ignoring, forgetting, and distorting any information that does not. This is a very empirically robust bias.
> 7 votes

# Answer
What you describe has some similarities with the primacy effect (but I take Arnon's point that the phrase as you describe seems to relate specifically to first impressions in person perception). There is a lot of memory research which relates the order of presentation of a set of stimuli to the degree of recall. The primacy effect is the name given for the tendency for people to recall initially presented items better than subsequent items. However, there is also the recency effect which captures probably the stronger effect whereby items processed more recently tend to be recalled better. Thus, you often get a kind of u-shaped relationship between order of stimulus presentation and recall.

There are range of explanations for the primacy effect. For example, people may have greater opportunity to rehearse initial stimuli and thereby consolidate memory.

Within broader contexts of life, I imagine the primacy effect would map on to a wide range of processes. For example, first impressions have been studied in the context of how we perceive other people. This is presumably related to the concept that we spend time initially forming impressions and then tend to fall back on these impressions rather than update them based on subsequent experience.

Similarly in the skill acquisition context, we often spend an initial period learning a task and then gradually settle into a strategy.
> 5 votes

# Answer
I think you're referring to ***Halo and Horns Effect*** by Edward Thorndike.

> It is a cognitive bias that causes you to allow one trait, either good (halo) or bad (horns), to overshadow other traits, behaviors, actions, or beliefs.

If you perceive a celebrity, for example, as kind, approachable, and talented you might think that he has no flaws and be free from any criminal liability - that is **Halo Effect**. For example, we find Michael Jackson as very talented and one of a kind performer. However, some people cannot believe and won't accept the fact that he sexually abused a child in 1993. Those people won't accept this fact because they were drawn on the good image of MJ before.

On the other hand, if you find a person ugly and lazy you perceive them as pest in the society and have no dreams for their lives - that is **Horns Effect**. One big example of this is the perception of everybody about Floyd Mayweather, Jr. We find him arrogant and cheater especially in the field of Boxing and always thinks of his money. But that doesn't mean he is not nice to his friends and don't attend to any religious activities.

There goes a saying, "*First impression last*". Some people, including me, believe that first impressions do not last, but some cannot get over with it.
> 3 votes

---
Tags: cognitive-psychology, social-psychology
---


# Question
Title: How does an animal learn what a predator is?
A while ago I heard the following anecdote:

> "On some tropical island, explorers infested the island with rats that wrecked the native ecosystem. To get rid of rats, people introduced cats that instead of hunting rats killed off the entire island's bird population".

The explanation given is that birds could not recognize cats as predators and/or did not have natural predators in the environment. This made me think - is there any part of a bird that on a genetic level knows that some other organism is a predator and is to be avoided?

For animals that live surrounded by predators, for example a house sparrow - **how does a bird learn that cats are predators, but squirrels are not?**

An example might help illustrate my question: Let's say someone takes house sparrows from America and breeds them for 3 generations on the same tropical island with no predators - would such 3rd generation sparrow still recognize cats as predators?

# Answer
To answer your question, you really have to specify what animal your talking about, some animals simply won't live long enough for learning to be an effective mechanism.

If there are few predators, evolution will favour animals who are less vigilant about checking for potential predators generally, since this costs time (Google search vigilance behavioral ecology).

Do address JeromeJ theory in that comment, teaching is fairly rare in the animal kingdom, even amongst Apes. I don't know any examples of teaching about predator detection, although it is believed that Meerkats teach their young how to kill poisonous scorpions and ants teach each other the location of new sources of food (see http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Social\_learning\_in\_animals)

Rather than explicit teaching, it might be likely that birds socially learn infomation about predators simply from observation, although i'm not sure how often this occurs. A nice little example shows that wild crows learnt to avoid and "mob" specific humans using facial identification http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2011/06/20/rspb.2011.0957

I don't know enough to give a more detailed response though!
> 3 votes

---
Tags: learning, behaviorism, animal-cognition
---


# Question
Title: Word for the opposite of “hypochondriasis”
This question was posted in English.stackexchange.

> Is there a word for the opposite condition of **hypochondriasis**? For example, someone who denies being sick when they clearly are? I would just say that they are "*in denial*". Is there any other adequate word?

Some answered ***egosyntonic***. Is it correct?

P.S. Credits to *Renan*

# Answer
> 5 votes
It seems to depend on the reason for denying their illness...

Egosyntonic:

> ... a term referring to behaviors, values, feelings that are in harmony with or acceptable to the needs and goals of the ego, or consistent with one's ideal self-image. ... Many personality disorders are considered to be egosyntonic ... Anorexia ... is also considered egosyntonic because many of its sufferers deny that they have a problem.

People with personality disorders for example, may be fully aware and accepting of their behaviour, they simply don't see it as a problem.

Denial / abnegation:

> ... is used for a psychological defense mechanism ..., in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence. ... In denial, an individual does not see or is mostly unconscious of existence of the truth or fact. The choice to refuse reality, then, is unconscious as well.

Someone may deny their illness because it makes them uncomfortable in some way - eg, they are embarrassed about it or concerned about negative perceptions by others.

Anosognosia:

> ... a deficit of self-awareness, a condition in which a person who suffers a certain disability seems unaware of the existence of his or her disability. ... Anosognosia is relatively common following different etiologies of brain injury ..., but can appear to occur in conjunction with virtually any neurological impairment.

In Anton–Babinski syndrome (visual anosognosia) for example, a person is blind, but nonetheless claims to be able see, and this is due to brain damage in the visual cortex.

Hypochondria is undue alarm about any physical or psychological symptoms, no matter how minor they may be. So I would argue that the best counterpart is minimisation \- a cognitive distortion:

> ... is the opposite of exaggeration. ... downplaying the significance of an event or emotion ...

A medical condition that fits this description is anosodiaphoria:

> ... a condition in which a person who suffers disability due to brain injury seems indifferent to the existence of their handicap. ... a disorder of the body schema in which patients verbally acknowledge a clinical problem ... but fail to be concerned about it.

So while a hypochondriac makes a big deal out of a small problem, anosodiaphoria is making a small deal out of a big problem.

Also see hyperchondria.

---
Tags: terminology, psychiatry
---


# Question
Title: Explanatory gaps in the formation and propagation of action potentials
To my understanding, the steps of an action potential are as follows:

1. The neuron is at rest--there is a negative charge (K ions) inside the cell, and a positive charge (Na ions) outside the cell. Pumps work hard, pumping in K and pumping out Na to maintain this polarization.
2. Excitatory NTs bind with the dendrites. As soon as it's over a certain threshold it triggers an action potential.
3. The inside of the cell depolarizes, and the depolarized "chunk" propagates through the axon.

Now here's my confusion:

A. How do neurotransmitters manage to depolarize the inside of the cell? Do they force the cell to give up pumping out Na ions? Do the neurotransmitters themselves contain positively charged ions that the ion pumps are not sensitive to?

B. When the cell depolarizes, the electrical impulse travels down the axon. When this happens, Na+ and K+ ions rapidly pass through the membrane as the signal fires. (Like this picture) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action\_potential#mediaviewer/File:Action\_Potential.gif

Why are ions being pumped in and out of the axon in such a way to propagate an action potential? Why isn't it just a positively charged signal running through the axon, without regard to the outside environment? (please let me know if this is unclear!)

# Answer
I will try to answer all of your main and sub questions structurally below:

## How do neurotransmitters manage to depolarize the inside of the cell?

1. *Do they force the cell to give up pumping out Na ions?*
**No, the Na,K-ATPase (the sodium potassium pump) keeps active, also during the action potential (AP).**
2. *Do the neurotransmitters themselves contain positively charged ions that the ion pumps are not sensitive to?*
**They can, but neurotransmitter charge is irrelevant**.
3. **Answer**: Neurotransmitters bind to their corresponding receptors. An example excitatory neurotransmitter is glutamate (Glu). Glu has many receptors and one of them is the NMDA receptor. The NMDA receptor is coupled to a cation channel that opens when Glu binds (and other conditions pertain). In turn Na+ and other depolarizing cations can enter the cell through the open channel. Other neurotransmitters and receptor mechanisms exist, but the coupling to a cation channel is a commonly encountered theme.

## When the cell depolarizes, the electrical impulse travels down the axon. When this happens, Na+ and K+ ions rapidly pass through the membrane as the signal fires. \[...\]

4. *Why are ions being pumped in and out of the axon in such a way to propagate an action potential?*
During an action potential, the voltage changes are **not the result of ions being pumped in or out of the cell**. Instead, ions flow along their concentration and charge gradients out or in the cell during an action potential. For example, Na+, a key ion in any action potential, flows **passively into the cell during an action potential.** Passive influx occurs, because Na+ is continuously and actively pumped out of the cell into the extracellular fluid by the Na,K-ATPase. Moreover, the inside of the cell is highly negatively charged. Both the *concentration gradient* and *charge gradient (i.e., the potential difference)* will cause Na+ to surge into the cell once Na+ channels open. How then does it move across the axon? The trick is that Na+ *depolarizes* the cell membrane. When for example Glu binds to its NMDA receptor, Na+ enters the cell into the dendrite. Then, *voltage-gated ion channels* take over. Voltage-gated ion channels open or close depending on the local membrane potential. Most notably, voltage-gated sodium channels (VGSCs) open when the cell membrane depolarizes. Hence, after NMDA receptors are activated in the dendrite, Na+ enters. This in turn depolarizes the dendrite and VGSCs open. This causes further depolarization and *adjacent* VGSCs open etc. etc. Voltage-gated potassium channels open after the VGSCs and re-polarize the membrane. An overview is provided in the following image from Antranik.org :

5. *Why isn't it just a positively charged signal running through the axon, without regard to the outside environment?*
Charges only move to an opposite charge. A neuron is not differentially charged from dendrite to axon terminal. Hence another way of action potential transduction is needed. Step-wise opening of VGSCs is a clever trick to use a constant cell membrane potential to generate a directional action potential.
> 7 votes

# Answer
To answer your question #5:

> "Why are ions being pumped in and out of the axon in such a way to propagate an action potential?

As AliceD's answer provided, the ions during an action potential are not being pumped, and don't even *need* to be pumped, but just passively flow into or out of the axon due to the forces of electricity and diffusion. As an example, imagine a water balloon filled with dye, and you prick it with a pin underwater: the balloon need not pump the dye out, it will just diffuse out.

> Why isn't it just a positively charged signal running through the axon,

There *is* a passive spread of charge down the length of the axon, at least for some short distance. However, axons are generally too long for that spread to get all the way to the end of the axon. Therefore, the signal must be amplified over and over down the length of the axon in order to (attempt to) insure it gets to the end.

> without regard to the outside environment?"

Just a point of language here: When speaking of voltage (AKA potential), you need to refer to two positions, and when discussing the action potential we use the inside of the axon relative to the outside.
> 0 votes

---
Tags: neuroscience, neurophysiology
---


# Question
Title: Comparison between IO psychology, Arbeitspsychologie and Psychologie du travail et des organisations
Reading the Wikipedia pages on IO Psychology, Arbeitspsychologie and Psychologie du travail et des organisations you can see many differences on the topics and authors of the fields.

At a first sight, this is strongly opinion-based, it looks like in France it is given more importance to suicides at work, while Germany studies a lot of workplace health promotion, while US is more focused on productivity. Is that correct?

What are the common and different things between theories in US, German and French, IO Psychologies?

Is there a textbook or an article that draws the comparison?

# Answer
In this case, wikipedia is not such a good starting point, because at least the German and the French articles do not seem very well developed and are unlikely to be representative of the research in the respective countries. This is in part my subjective opinion, but can also be seen in their length, which is very short compared to the English article.

Nevertheless, there are differences between research traditions in these countries. A good introduction is Peter Warr's chapter “Some Historical Developments in I-O Psychology Outside USA" in Koppes (2007) which compares US and European approaches.

For example with regard to differences between research in the US and Germany, Warr observes that

> In general, German psychologists have been more sympathetic to broad conceptual frameworks (...) This German preference is illustrated by the development of broad "action theories". Those (...)\[view\] the concept of action as integrating otherwise unrelated issues of job performance, stress, errors, skill development, and other processes.
>
> Whereas American I-O psychology has focused more on abilities, motivation, and similar precursors, action theory examines knowledge, cognitive understanding, mental strategies, and processes of self-regulation. (...) This traditional focus on regulatory processes between an environmental input and behavior has been different in both style and content from most American theorizing. (p. 85).

**References**

Laura L. Koppes (Ed.). Historical Perspectives in Industrial and Organizational Psychology. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007.
> 2 votes

---
Tags: reference-request, io-psychology
---


# Question
Title: Does deep, slow breathing increase mental performance?
*Emotional Intelligence 2.0* said that breathing deeply and slowly increases mental performance, but I couldn't find any studies that really study the claim, and the book is a self-help book, which tend to be extremely unrigorous. So, does it increase mental performance?

# Answer
I spent some time searching various databases with a variety of different keywords related to breathing techniques and mental outcomes. I only found a couple of studies that have looked at certain Yoga deep breathing techniques and their effects on cognitive tests measuring attention/concentration (Shirley Telles et al. 2007, 2013). Some of these specific techniques (such as selective or alternate nostril breathing) seemed to lead to better performance as compared to control groups (e.g., only breathing awareness).

I have to admit that I am a bit skeptical because the studies have small samples and placebo effects may have played a role.

**In conclusion, there does not seem to be much research that would allow the strong and general claim the self-help book is making.**

**References**

Shirley Telles, P. Raghuraj, Satyapriya Maharana, and H. R. Nagendra (2007) immediate effect of three yoga breathing techniques on performance on a letter-cancellation task. Perceptual and motor skills: volume 104, issue , pp. 1289-1296.

Shirley Telles, Arti Yadav, Ram Kumar Gupta, and Acharya Balkrishna (2013) Reaction Time Following Yoga Bellows-Type Breathing and Breath Awareness. Perceptual and Motor Skills: Volume 117, Issue , pp. 89-98. doi: 10.2466/22.25.PMS.117x10z4
> 7 votes

---
Tags: intelligence
---


# Question
Title: Is there a rating scale in psychology that is related to happiness?
There are many rating scales used in psychiatry to rate the severity of disorders. Thus, the extensive depression scales. What about the opposite, happiness scales? If 0 denotes excessive depressive symptoms and 100 denotes absence of these symptoms, does a scale exist that say goes from 100 (absence of depressive symptoms) to 200 (hyperthymia, euphoria)?

# Answer
> 3 votes
There are a number of scales that are used to measure happiness.

I don't think these scales measure a kind of excessive euphoria or other maladaptive states that you may or may not have in mind, given that you allude to depression. If yes, you may want to look into the diagnosis of bipolar disorder, or questionnaires about drug consumption. This would not be about happiness per se though.

**References**

Diener, E., Emmons, R. A., Larsen, R. J., & Griffin, S. (1985). The Satisfaction with Life Scale. Journal of Personality Assessment, 49, 71-75.

Hills, P., & Argyle, M. (2002). The Oxford Happiness Questionnaire: a compact scale for the measurement of psychological well-being. Personality and Individual Differences, 33(7), 1073–1082. http://doi.org/10.1016/S0191-8869(01)00213-6

Lyubomirsky, S., & Lepper, H. (1999). A measure of subjective happiness: Preliminary reliability and construct validation. Social Indicators Research, 46, 137-155

Watson, D., Clark, L. A. & Tellegen, A. (1988). Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS Scales. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 1063–1070.

---
Tags: emotion, clinical-psychology, positive-psychology
---


# Question
Title: Are new memories stored in new neurons generated in the hippocampus?
I heard recently from Demis Hassabis that if the hippocampus is damaged that new memories cannot be formed. I also heard recently that it has been discovered that new neurons continue to be produced in the brains of adults in the hippocampus region. Does this mean that new memories are stored in the new neurons generated in the hippocampus?

# Answer
> 7 votes
Memories are generally understood to be encoded within networks of neurons, and not within neurons themselves. New neurons are certainly useful, but they are not necessary to store new memories.

Indeed, the hippocampus is extremely *plastic*, meaning that the connection strength between different neurons can change rapidly, and sometimes, new connections are also formed via the growth of new synapses (this is different than the addition of new neurons). However, "new" memories are often stored using different, overlapping subsets of neurons, which is commonly referred to as *global remapping* in the hippocampus.

Remapping comes from the notion that many pyramidal cells in the hippocampus show place-selectivity (so-called place cells) and many of the same neurons that encode one particular environment (e.g., your bedroom), would be recruited to encode an entirely different environment (e.g, your kitchen) with no apparent relationship between the two. That is, the subset of neurons recruited to encode a particular environment seems to be random, and the topology is not preserved: neurons that encoded adjacent regions in your bedroom might encode very distant regions in your kitchen, or no regions at all.

## Short answer

Now to answer your question more clearly: the hippocampus is indeed critical for new memory formation; however, memories are not stored within individual neurons, but rather within collections of neurons (which could include both new and old neurons) and in the connection strengths of those neurons in particular. The same (new or old) neuron can be used and re-used in many memories, without disrupting the other memories that it forms part of.

## Further information

A relatively accessible read (if you're so inclined) is **Diekelmann, S., & Born, J. (2010). The memory function of sleep. Nature Reviews. Neuroscience, 11(2), 114–26. doi:10.1038/nrn2762**, but it requires a paid subscription or institutional access. Alternatively, Scholarpedia has many good articles, including this one on the hippocampus, which goes a little further to explain part of our current understanding of how new memories are transferred (consolidated) to long-term storage in the neocortex.

---
Tags: long-term-memory
---


# Question
Title: What is the name of the scientific study of hypothesis formation?
As a layperson, I am interested about the scientific method but whenever I search it online I get endless results about how to formulate and test hypotheses for the purpose of writing a scientific paper.

I'm trying to find the term of the process by which people make and test informal theories and hypotheses during their daily lives.

Example A young child touches an unfamiliar object and, purely by coincidence, there is a distant clap of thunder. The child 'hypothesized' that the touch caused the clap of thunder. This is now testable because the child can repeat the experiment.

If I want to read more about this in psychology, what do I put in my search engine to avoid getting thousands of results about null hypotheses and t-tests?

# Answer
> 8 votes
One umbrella term is **causal reasoning**, though this is a bit broader since there are theories of causal reasoning that are not about hypothesis testing.

A Google Scholar search for "causal reasoning psychology" generates several hundred thousand hits, and the first page is full of relevant papers.

Getting more specific, Klayman & Ha (1987) wrote an influential article about the kinds of hypothesis testing you describe. Looking at the papers that cite that article might give you some additional leads into the literature.

# Answer
> 0 votes
This is actually called *abductive* reasoning. As for how it the hypotheses are generated, one way is through analogical matching and inference (search google scholar for Analogico-deductive reasoning, for example).

---
Tags: learning
---


# Question
Title: If you sleep during the day, do you need less sleep at night?
If, say, you sleep 2-3 hours during the day (in the afternoon) - Do you need less sleep at night?

After all, subjects feel less tired in the evening after sleeping during day.

Can sleep hours be accumulated in a linear fashion? For example: Will sleeping 3 hours during the day justify sleeping just 4-5 hours during the night?

# Answer
**Short answer:** Yes, if you sleep 2--3 hours during the day, you generally need less sleep at night.

**Important considerations:** However, the short answer is not the full story. In particular, in answer to your question about whether or not sleep hours can be accumulated in a linear fashion, the answer is strictly no, but approximately yes.

To understand the problem with assuming linearity of sleep, consider the extreme example of "sleeping" for one minute, and then being awake the next, and keep doing this for the entire day. In theory, you would have spent 12 hours awake, and 12 hours asleep. But of course, you'll feel exhausted, and would be in desperate need of some good sleep.

What's important to keep in mind, is the different *stages* of sleep. See http://www.helpguide.org/articles/sleep/how-much-sleep-do-you-need.htm for a good overview.

**The Stages of Sleep**:

> **Non-REM sleep**
>
> *Stage N1* (Transition to sleep) – This stage lasts about five minutes. Your eyes move slowly under the eyelids, muscle activity slows down, and you are easily awakened.
>
> *Stage N2* (Light sleep) – This is the first stage of true sleep, lasting from 10 to 25 minutes. Your eye movement stops, heart rate slows, and body temperature decreases.
>
> *Stage N3* (Deep sleep) – You’re difficult to awaken, and if you are awakened, you do not adjust immediately and often feel groggy and disoriented for several minutes. In this deepest stage of sleep, your brain waves are extremely slow. Blood flow is directed away from your brain and towards your muscles, restoring physical energy.
>
> **REM sleep**
>
> *REM sleep* (Dream sleep) – About 70 to 90 minutes after falling asleep, you enter REM sleep, where dreaming occurs. Your eyes move rapidly, your breathing shallows, and your heart rate and blood pressure increase. Also during this stage, your arm and leg muscles are paralyzed.

**In Conclusion:** Sleep hours can be thought of as accumulating linearly *in blocks of sleep cycles*. That is, as long as you hit the right sleep stages during your nap, it counts! Generally, a complete sleep cycle lasts about 90 minutes, so sleep in multiples of 90 minutes would be ideal...
> 11 votes

---
Tags: sleep
---


# Question
Title: Do people low on agreeableness swear more?
Reading through a scientific report on Big 5 characteristics in everyday life, I found a -.28 correlation for Agreaableness and swearing. http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~mehl/eReprints/EARlensmodelJPSP.pdf

Do other studies usually support this? Is swearing (in combination with other cues) a useful indication of low agreeableness?

# Answer
> 4 votes
There are a number of findings showing that people who are low in agreeableness swear more often. Apologies for the long full quote, but the relevant literature has just recently been nicely reviewed in a chapter about "Natural language use as a marker of personality" by Ireland and Mehl (2014). They cite the study you based your question on (Mehl, Gosling, & Pennebaker, 2006), which is very nice because it uses a relatively unobtrusive recording device (the Electronically Activated Recorder, EAR) to collect data about naturally occurring conversation. However, they also cite additional evidence that is in line with this finding:

> Another face valid linguistic correlate of agreeableness is swearing. Unsurprisingly, people swear less to the degree that they report being more agreeable (Holtgraves, 2010; Mehl et al., 2006; Yarkoni, 2010; see Jay, 2009).

Is swearing a reliable indicator of low agreeableness?

> Indeed, the five words that best discriminate between individuals ranking high and low in agreeableness in Facebook status updates are all swear words (Schwartz et al., 2013). The negative correlation between agreeableness and swearing fits with lay theories of personality as well and is correctly interpreted by outside observers of students’ EAR recordings (Mehl et al., 2006). Given the low overall incidence of swearing – making up about 1/3 of a percent of spoken conversation and 1/10 of a percent of emotional writing – these results essentially mean that highly agreeable people are unlikely to swear even once in a given sample, whereas a highly disagreeable person might swear only a few times. Nevertheless, swearing, like negative emotion words, another low-frequency category, is a potent and reliable indicator of agreeableness and other key psychological variables (e.g., Robbins, Focella, Kasle, Weihs, Lopez, & Mehl, 2011).

**References**

Ireland, M. E., & Mehl, M. R. (2014). Natural language use as a marker of personality. In T. M. Holtgraves & T. M. (Ed) Holtgraves (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of language and social psychology., Oxford library of psychology (pp. 201–218). New York, NY, US: Oxford University Press.

---
Tags: measurement, personality, language
---


title: How do you make psychology experiments?

text:
# Question
Title: How do you make psychology experiments?
Have you used Inquisit, E-Prime, DirectRT, or Qualtrics to make psychology experiments? I worked in a psychology lab as a programmer and I thought these programs felt very outdated and not user friendly. I started making a software that lets you make experiments without having to code. But posts like this(How can I create computer based psychology experiments using OS X?) seem to suggest researchers or professors don't mind learning a little bit of coding to make experiments.

Question: if you have used such softwares to make experiments, what did you think about the process? Also, do you think there are many people who would want a new software that does everything but without coding?

Thank you so much!

# Answer
> Question: if you have used such softwares to make experiments, what did you think about the process?

We use Paradigm (www.paradigmexperiments.com) in our lab and like it quite a bit. You can build most experiments just with the drag and drop builder interface. It also supports Python scripting just to give you more flexibility (and piece of mind in case you're trying to do something the builder doesn't support). In general it's pretty easy, the company that makes it has been great with support when we have run into difficulty but by and large our students are able to figure it out.

> ...seem to suggest researchers or professors don't mind learning a little bit of coding to make experiments.

Right now almost all of the experiment presentation programs that work on OS X are scripting-based (e.g. Python) so I think that's why you're getting that impression. From my own experience it's not true. Most new RAs and grad students are pretty unhappy when they are told they have to learn Python before they can even start doing any research.

> Also, do you think there are many people who would want a new software that does everything but without coding?

I think it would be very difficult to build new software that did not use scripting at all. The nature of research is that everyone is trying to do something no one has done before, so you really need to have a way for people to extend the software's functionality without waiting for the next version otherwise no one is going to use it. Having said that, Superlab (www.cedrus.com) has attempted to do it but with, what I feel, are mixed results.
> 2 votes

---
Tags: methodology, experimental-psychology, survey
---


# Question
Title: Advantage of active learning on classification tasks
I am looking for a specific type of experimental test of active learning. Given some artificial or natural learning task that consists of classifying inputs $x$ from a large input space $X$. There is some underlying function $f: X \rightarrow \\{0,1\\}$ to be learned, this function can come from some restricted function class $C$. The subject knows the description of the function class, but has to learn the specific parameters that define the function. I am looking for experiments that had two conditions of this type:

1. The subject is given labeled samples $(x,f(x))$ from some distribution on $X$ that they have no control over.
2. The subject is allowed to ask for specific $x \in X$ and receive the labeled sample $(x,f(x))$.

The first condition would correspond to passive learning, while the second to active learning.

From arm-chair expectations (or formal theories like CoLT), one would expect that on certain tasks the subjects in the active condition would be able to significantly outperform (predict the underlying function more accurately) than in the passive condition.

**Can you provide references to specific experiments that would fit in this paradigm? What were their results? On what sort of tasks does active learning provide an advantage? How significant is this advantage?**

---

### Example

An example would be a subject sitting in front of a blank screen. They are told "there is a straight line that divides this screen into a red and green region. Can you find it?". Thus, the set $X$ would correspond to coordinates, and an input $x$ would be a specific coordinate, say $x = (1,3)$. The function class would be the set of straight line partitions of the screen. A specific function with $0$ meaning red and $1$ \- green might be:

$$f((a,b)) = \begin{cases}0 & \mathrm{if} \\; a \> b \\ 1 & \mathrm{otherwise}\end{cases}$$

In the active task, the participant can click on any point $x$ on the screen to turn it from blank to either red (if $f(x) = 0$) or green (if $f(x) = 1$). In the passive trial, some number of points are selected and revealed at random to the subject.

# Answer
This isn't my area of expertise, but it's an interesting question so I did some poking around and ran across a couple of relevant papers.

## Human active learning

http://papers.nips.cc/paper/3456-human-active-learning

Castro, R. M., Kalish, C., Nowak, R., Qian, R., Rogers, T., & Zhu, X. (2009). Human active learning. In Advances in neural information processing systems (pp. 241-248).

In this paper, the authors compare human performance on a classification task using (a) randomly selected samples, (b) human-selected examples (i.e., "active learning"), and (c) machine-selected samples ("machine-assisted active learning"). Participants in all three conditions were tested regularly on the classification task as they accumulated examples. Somewhat surprisingly (for me -- I would have expected the human-selected condition to learn the fastest), participants in the machine-selected example case were the fastest learners, particularly when label noise was large.

## Category learning through active sampling

http://palm.mindmodeling.org/cogsci2010/papers/0041/paper0041.pdf

Markant, D., & Gureckis, T. M. (2010). Category learning through active sampling. In Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 248-253).

The task in this paper is a linear separation-boundary location task like the example you provide. It might be worth a look just to see whether it is similar to what you were describing.

(Also here's a more recent journal-length paper from the same authors: Markant, D. B., & Gureckis, T. M. (2014). Is it better to select or to receive? Learning via active and passive hypothesis testing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(1), 94.)
> 1 votes

---
Tags: learning, experimental-psychology
---


# Question
Title: Are there any models of the human visual field of view taking into account head, neck and eye movements and calculating likelihood of fixation?
I would like to know if there are studies that (1) model the field of view taking into account all degrees of freedom of the head, neck and eyes and (2) if there is any probabilistic model assigned to the field that is independent from external stimuli, e.g. saliency.

An example to illustrate this, is the following:
A man is inside a black room (no saliency, no external stimuli) and he is walking or standing. Now, inside this room, take a point in space that is not on the man. What is the likelihood that the man gazes (equals to have the right head, eye and neck coordination) towards this point at a given moment t1?

# Answer
> 1 votes
Disclaimer: This answer is a bit self-serving because it only describes research work from the lab where I am a student. However, I think it's relevant for the question!

## Coordination of eye, head, and hand

http://www.cis.rit.edu/research/vpl/publications/ExpBrainRes2001.pdf

Pelz, J., Hayhoe, M., & Loeber, R. (2001). The coordination of eye, head, and hand movements in a natural task. Experimental Brain Research, 139(3), 266-277.

This paper analyzes eye, head, and hand movements in subjects while they copy a block pattern. It doesn't incorporate any of the neck movements as such, though.

## Predictive saccades in virtual reality

http://www.journalofvision.org/content/13/1/20.full

Diaz, G., Cooper, J., Rothkopf, C., & Hayhoe, M. (2013). Saccades to future ball location reveal memory-based prediction in a virtual-reality interception task. Journal of vision, 13(1), 20.

In this work, a virtual racquetball task is used to elicit predictive eye movements in freely-moving subjects while wearing a head-mounted virtual reality display (including an eye tracker). The VR display and racquet are tracked using a motion-capture tool. The results are mostly focused on eye-in-head but incorporate some neat methods for extracting gaze points using the virtual world, and for showing the data on a graph.

---
Tags: cognitive-modeling, vision, statistics, eye-movement, human-factors
---


# Question
Title: Which intervention improves the ability to remember names the most?
Is there research about psychological interventions to help the average person remember names? If so, which intervention or interventions have the best evidence base to support them?

Are there good academic books about the subject of how humans manage to remember names?

# Answer
*Too long for a comment, so given as answer.*

I know of no studies, but what teachers do is connect each name to a face (that is "elaborate") and repeat this elaboration each time they enter class and check attendance (sort of like learning vocabulary or a poem). Personally, I write down the names in the sitting order of the pupils or students, because I remember where which "face" sat. Another option is to find the person on Facebook, download a photo from their profile, and add that to a list of the names. Then I repeatedly look at that list. What also helps is actually addressing the person by name each time you speak to them, especially after they gave their name to you the first time, but also when you meet them again.

Hope this helps in case you want practical proven advice.
> 2 votes

---
Tags: memory, reference-request, educational-psychology
---


# Question
Title: Where to find recent most important studies and researches?
Is there any website or journal that publishes most significant recent studies and articles in psychology? I have access to EBSCO database, but there are thousands of articles and most of them of almost no importancy and I have no idea how to find those good and important ones.

# Answer
By definition all journals publish "recent studies" because they are publishing all the time (either on a monthly/qaurterly basis). Sometimes, journals publish articles online months before in print. However i think your question is about finding the best articles, rather than journals, and there are a few tricks.

If you have access to any good search engine (google scholar, web of science, scopus), you can perform searches in there, and then rank articles by number of citations. This will give you the most important and talked about studies, although by nature they will be quite old studies, since in order to be the most cited they have to be out for a while.

Another good trick is to use webofscience / webofknowledge feature which lets you look at articles that have cited a specific paper. Say you find a classic study that you want to find more recent research on, webofknowledge will let you find recent studies that have cited that paper.

Alternatively a good place to start is looking through review articles or textbooks first. You can find these by adding "review" to your search terms, e.g. ("Social learning" AND "animals" AND "review").

Finally, looking at the web pages of important researchers in a given field would be a good place to find recent research, usually they will have fairly up to date lists of their recent research If you've done a bit of reading then you should be able to identify key researchers in a given field.
> 3 votes

---
Tags: study-cognitive-sciences
---


# Question
Title: Taking into account reliability of Raven's Matrices and Self Monitoring tests
I've results of two tests administered to university students:

1. the 18-item true-false version of the Self-Monitoring Scale (Snyder & Gangestad, 1986);
2. the Raven Progressive Matrices Test (John & Raven, 2003).

In the past I've been assessing personality profiles of students, referring to the five factor model of personality and using a test based on the International Personality Item Pool (Goldberg et al., 2006). In this case I was measuring reliability by Alpha coefficients. However, these coefficient seems not to make sense in a test like Raven's where there are only correct and wrong answers. Same doubts apply to the other test.

Should I measure the reliability of these two tests (Raven and Self-monitoring) on my sample? If so, which measure should I use?

# Answer
Regarding Cronbach's $\alpha$, Wikipedia writes:

> It has been proposed that $\alpha$ can be viewed as the expected correlation of two tests that measure the same construct.

Note that correlation is a nonparametric concept. Its definition is independent on the functional form and functional relationship of the two variables. There are numerous ways to measure correlation that take the functional form into account. Pearson correlation and point-biserial correlation are probably the most well known.

In the case of two binary variables some notable measures are: Matthews correlation coefficient, Cohen's $\kappa$ or Pearson's $\phi$. One may also consider measures from Signal detection theory. Cronbach's $\alpha$ is also applicable to binary variables. In fact, the Wikipedia page lists a simplified formula (due to Cronbach, 1970) for the case where both variables are binary.

To conclude, there is nothing wrong with application of Cronbach's $\alpha$ to binary items. Still, other measures of relationship between two binary variables exist and may be worth considering.

**Reference:** Cronbach LJ (1970). Essentials of Psychological Testing. Harper & Row. p. 161.
> 1 votes

---
Tags: measurement, personality, intelligence
---


title: Why do humans cry?

text:
# Question
Title: Why do humans cry?
People cry when they experience intense emotions. Crying seems to occur most frequently in intense episodes of sadness and fear, but sometimes also happens when people are very happy or angry. What is the purpose of crying and which role has it played during human evolution? Which theories explain how crying may have given humans an evolutionary advantage?

# Answer
The two main folks in crying research (of whom I'm aware) are Ad Vingerhoets and Jonathan Rottenberg. They've (together and separately) published reviews of adult crying and crying across the lifespan, as well as empirical articles. The general impression they give is that we know very little about the neuropsychobiology of crying, given that crying has been the focus of very little scientific investigation (despite its prominence in our understanding of emotions like sadness and grief).

There are a bunch of interpersonal, intrapersonal, and evolutionary theories about crying, but none have been particularly well tested (to my knowledge). Vingerhoets, Bylsma, and Rottenberg (2009) have put forth a model of adult crying that may help to explain some things about why we cry.

In general, this model suggests that:

1. Crying can attract support from other people, and those people can help reduce the distress that elicited the crying. (For a more general theory of interpersonal emotion regulation, see Zaki & Williams, 2013.)
2. Crying might lead to reduction of distress via some (poorly defined) psychobiological mechanisms. These mechanisms might include activation of the parasympathetic nervous system, opioid release, oxytocin release, beliefs about the functions of crying, the calming effects of rhythmic behavior, and more (see Gracanin, Bylsma, Vingerhoets, 2014).

If crying attracts social support and can reduce distress, then this may improve overall evolutionary fitness. This is especially true in vulnerable infants, who use crying as a means to attract the attention of their parents in distressing situations (Rottenberg & Vingerhoets, 2012). Crying may be less important in adulthood, but may have persisted either due to (1) general intra- and interpersonal emotion regulation benefits and/or (2) neoteny (see Rottenberg & Vingerhoets, 2012, p. 225 for an explanation).

However, it's not true that crying is always cathartic. This is very much context- and person-dependent (Bylsma, Vingerhoets, & Rottenberg, 2008; Bylsma et al., 2011). Nonetheless, crying may have stuck around due to its importance in infancy as a loud vocal signal to the parents.

Regarding why we cry during positive experiences--well, there's not a lot of good evidence here. However, it's quite possible that positive experiences do not elicit crying (Vingerhoets & Rottenberg, 2012). Instead, it might be our tendency to reflect on negative experiences during positive moments that elicits crying (e.g., the positive experience of college graduation might elicit reflection on the many college struggles we had or the fact that we're not going to see our friends as often).

Overall, there's a lot more research to be done on crying, so stick around. The hypotheses/theories presented above are probably pretty sound, but there's still a lot we don't understand.
> 12 votes

# Answer
In addition to @mrt's great answer. I feel that the following excerpt from the 'crying' section from the "The Newborn Infant" chapter in my Developmental Psychology classes' textbook would shed light on your question. This is quoted directly from "How Children Develop, Third Edition" by Robert Siegler, Judy DeLoache and Nancy Eisenberg":

> How do you feel when you hear a baby cry? We imagine that, like most people, you find the sound of a crying infant extremely unpleasant. Why is an infant's crying so aversive?
>
> From an evolutionary point of view, adults' aversion to infant's crying could have have adaptive value. Infants cry for many reasons - including illness, pain, and hunger - that require the attention of caregivers. Adults' high level of motivation to stop an infant's crying prompts them to take care of the infant's needs and hence promotes the infant's survival. This fact has led some researchers to suggest that in times of hardship, such as famine, cranky babies are more likely to survive than are placed ones, possibly because their distress elicits adult attention and they consequently get more than their share of scarce food resources (DeVries, 1984).
>
> Parents, especially first-timers, are often puzzled and anxious about why their baby is crying. Indeed, one of the most frequent complaints pediatricians hear concerns what parents think is excessive crying (Barr, 1998; Harkness et al.,1996). With experience, parents become better at interpreting their infant's crying, identifying characteristics of the cry itself (a sharp, piercing cry usually signals pain, for example) and considering the context (such as when the infant's last feeding was) (Green, Jones, & Gustafson, 1987).
>
> Crying increases from around 2 weeks of age to a peak at 6 weeks, but then declines to about an hour a day for the rest of the first year (St. James-Roberts & Halil, 1991). On a daily basis, the peak time for crying is late afternoon or evening. The phenomenon of "evening crying", which can be quite disappointing to parents looking forward to interacting with their baby at the end of the workday, may be due to an accumulation of excess stimulation over the course of the day.
>
> The nature of crying and the reason for it change with development. Early on, crying reflects discomfort from pain,hunger, cold or overstimulation, although, from the beginning, infants also cry from frustration (Lewis, Alessandri, & Sullivan, 1990; Sternberg, Campos, & Emde, 1983). Crying gradually becomes more of a communicative act; the crying of older babies often seems geared to "tell" caregivers something to get them to respond (Gustafson & Green, 1988).

**ISBN-13: 978-1429217903**

**ISBN-10: 1429217901**

---

**Sources cited by textbook:**

**DeVries, M.W.** (1984). Temperament and infant mortality among the Masai of East Africa. *American Journal of Psychiatry*, 141, 1189-1194.

**Barr, R. G.** (1998). Colic and crying syndromes in infants. In J. G. Warhol and S. P. Shelov (Eds.), *New Perspectives in Early Emotional Development* (pp. 147-157) Calverton, New York; Johnson & Johnson Pediatric Institute, LLC.

**Harkness, S., Super, C., Keefer, C. H., Raghavan, C. S., & Campbell, E. K.** (1996). Ask the doctor: The negotiation of cultural models in American parent-pediatrician discourse. In S. Harkness & C.M. Super (Eds.), *Parent's cultural belief systems: Their origins, expressions and consequences*. New York: Guildford.

**Green, J.A., Jones, L.E., & Gustafson,G.E.** (1987) Perception of cries by parents and non parents: Relation to cry acoustics. *Developmental Psychology*, 23, 370-382.

**St. James-Roberts, I., & Halil, T.** (1991). Infant crying patterns in the first year: Normal community and clinical findings. *Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry*, 32, 951-968.

**Lewis, M. Alessandri, S. M., & Sullivan, M.W.** (1990). Violation of expectancy, loss of control, and anger expressions in young infants. *Developmental Psychology*, 26, 745-751.

**Sternberg, C., Campos, J., & Emde, R.** (1983). The facial expression of anger in seven-month-old infants. *Child Development*, 54, 178-184

**Gustafson, G. E., & Green, J. A.** (1988, April). *A role of crying in the development of prelinguistic communicative competence*. Paper presented at the International Conference on Infant Studies, Washington, DC.
> 5 votes

# Answer
I recall a study from maybe 30 years ago that got people to cry by chopping onions and others cry because of watching a sad movie. The content of the tears were tested, and the sad tears had a mood-elevating chemical element. I recall the study because I had seen the movie they used: All Mine To Give, about orphaned children, where the eldest had to parcel out the younger children. If you ever need a good cry . . . . Maybe tears of joy are connected with relief and also tied to mood-elevating hormones.
> -2 votes

# Answer
@Cemre,@MariaAnt-Humans' crying is very natural,because of the following fact: These are tears produced in response to that strong emotion that they experience from stress,pleasure,anger,sadness and suffering to indeed,physical pain (and often due to jealousy felt at others' success),Psychic tears even have a natural painkiller,called leucine enkephalin-perhaps the part of the reason why they might feel better after a good cry,These tears also play an useful role in preventing the eyes from drying out.
> -2 votes

---
Tags: social-psychology, emotion, evolution, evolutionary-psychology
---


# Question
Title: What causes some people to unconsciously imitate the accents of others?
**Background:** I often notice that when I talk with someone with an accent that I often unconsciously start to imitate their accent. Similarly, you see some people that very quickly after moving to a country start to adopt the local accent whereas others maintain their original accent for many years.

### Questions

* What causes individual differences in the tendency to unconsciously take on accents?
* Has there been research on the process of unconsciously imitating accents?

# Answer
> 19 votes
**TLDR** When two speakers become more similar in their speech this is called convergence or accomodation (opposite: divergence). This can occur on all levels of language, phonetics and phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. When mutual intellgibility is not an issue, accomodation mainly occurs when speakers like each other or want to appear likeable.

> **Q: Has there been research on the process of unconsciously imitating accents?**

Phonetic accommodation has been documented for a range of cases, for example for

Most studies have not studied spontaneous interaction and were mostly based on special elicitation techniques, but accommodation has also been documented in spontaneous speech (Levitan et al. 2012).

> **Q: What causes individual differences in the tendency to unconsciously take on accents?**

We converge with interlocutors that we like or that we want to like us (shown by, for example, Babel 2009). We diverge from those that we don't like, although this may be rarer - In general, speakers adopt pronunciations that they think are socially desirable in a situation (see Mather 2012 and the classic study by William Labov it is based on).

I beg to disagree with @Skippy's opinion that people "without a firm sense of identity or an underdeveloped ego" are more likely to accomodate or converge with another speaker. It rather appears that **converging with an interlocutor is a social skill** connected to empathy. You speak more like your interlocutor or a group you interact with so that you will be accepted as one of the team. This will make social interaction and achieving your aims easier than if you did not accomodate.

I don't mean to say that there are not people with "a firm sense of identity" that are particularly unlikely to converge with other speakers. But I do disagree with the implication behind these phrases, namely that "a firm sense of identity" (and not accomodating) is something desirable and an "underdeveloped ego" (and accomodating) something undesirable. On the contrary, **converging with other speakers is an important and valuable social skill** that helps us connect with other people and establish common ground. Those who (even unconsciously) insist on not accomodating to other speakers could also be characterised as having problems in adapting to new people or groups they come in contact with and lacking in empathy.

But I do see the point that those who are desparate for the approval of other people might go to great lengths to get it - including accomdating their speech to a high degree.

# Answer
> 5 votes
I noticed that too. And it's not only the accent but the usage of words (different for lawyer and for a farmer), the sounds the person is making, movements and gestures.

I think it has something to do with **"calibration" of your communication with your "opponent".** to get the best possible results when the brain thinks it's possible.

Notice how you do the same with small children. I think it would be very weird if you try to talk with a toddler like: "Dear Mr. John Smith, I would like to ask you if you like this yellow toy made of plastic."

I am sure you would say something like "Johnny, do you like this yellow doggie?"

By calibrating I mean, that if you know the background, accent, social status **you adapt**, your brain makes some calculations and decide what is the most beneficial behaviour (yeah, selfish gene again ;) ) based on your experience etc.

In this case to make the communication the least problematic you try to sound and act a little like your opponent.

When you really don't like the person you will not sound like him. But be aware that if it's e.g. some guy that was popular in the school when you was younger you can pick his accent too ;). It's because even if you don't like him, parts of your brain sees him as somebody who was more successful, had more girls etc. and your body reacts to your hidden/deeper thoughts and memories and try to impress him by sounding/acting more like him.

Another important thing in this process is that **sounding like the baby (high pitched voice), like a farmer/football fan (deep voice) transform you a little closer to your opponent. So you try to mirror him. And everybody is a little narcissist and like when he heard his voice (rewinding to your part on a record if you have a featuring as a singer) or see his own picture (the first thing after finding a picture is finding yourself) etc. ;)**

*Sometimes you imitate people when you don't like the person, but then it's intentional and not unconscious (as you mentioned in your question) and you try to make fun of or annoy that person etc.*

# Answer
> 2 votes
*I am adding this as an adjunct to @Derfder's answer.*

---

*I also emphasize, that, I will provide links, or references but my answer consists of my ideas and may, or may not have merit.*

---

There is the idea that we mirror people we like, our body language will match. Even people's breathing rates can match when they are close.. and women's menstrual cycle's when cohabiting (as discussed here).. This could be a link with our mating and instincts as social animals.

So it follows, that our speech and/or accent can also change.

The albatross epitomises the art of mirroring, with their mating dance.

---

I also have a theory, that people, without a firm sense of identity, or an underdeveloped ego will be more likely to pick up accents of peoples around them. For example if they live in another country. Unlike their healthy adult counterparts, who generally keep their original accent, and it only changes gradually over time; they will be like children will pick up and accent of their environment, perhaps being delayed at the Conformist stage (E4)

The stages of ego development proposed by Jane Loevinger.

---

*This link for the breathing and heart rates..followed by this link of publications Jan W. Kantelhardt.*

# Answer
> 2 votes
Imitating others behavior patterns while speaking was found to relate more to a cognitive perspective taking than empathy.Chartrand and Bargh 1999

People who do adopt language patterns and accents are actually aware that this makes them fit it and more likable. However, this becomes more difficult to do with age. People who do not imitate accents/speech patterns easily may have a strong sense of identity with the region where they initially learned to speak.

On a personal note I have noticed a few young adults who have a diagnosed difficultly perceiving phonemes and have learned to lip-read to compensate for this are able to pick up accents more easily.

---
Tags: language, communication, auditory-discrimination
---


title: Objective test for self-awareness?

text:
# Question
Title: Objective test for self-awareness?
Are there any means by which an observed entity (e.g.: an AI) can be tested for self-awareness using/applying/affecting mainly its visual-oral-auditory-senses and observed responses of same? Failing that, are there any such tests for organic life-forms?

# Answer
> 4 votes
To test self-awareness in **animals there is the Mirror test**. It involves painting something on the animal's head/face without their knowledge and observing what they do when they notice the paint in their own reflection in a mirror.

Additionally, robots have been tested for simple self-awareness by researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

---
Tags: awareness
---


# Question
Title: What kind of journal 'The Journal of Neuroscience Methods' is?
I am looking for some journal that publishes neuroscience research with focus on computational and/or methodological aspects. The *Journal of Neuroscience Methods* appears on a Google search but it has relatively low impact factor among the journals I have checked this far. What kind of reputation the journal has? Are there other good alternatives?

# Answer
> 1 votes
This is not a complete answer, but more based on surface observations.

* At time of posting, Journal of Neuroscience Methods has an impact factor of 2.0. This is quite a respectable impact factor.
* The scimagojr puts in the second quartile of "neuroscience (miscellaneous)" journals http://www.scimagojr.com/journalsearch.php?q=16765&tip=sid&clean=0
* It is published by Elsevier. While Elsevier has its detractors, particularly around its open access policy, it is a respectable academic publisher.

---
Tags: publication
---


# Question
Title: Could ketosis be therapeutic for ADHD based on the neuro-energetic theory of attention?
I'm a complete neuroscience novice so please bear with me.

One of the more interesting theories of the etiology of ADHD that I've read posits that the disorder may be one of neuroenergetics - the result of insufficient and variable neuronal energy production due to insufficient "formation and supply of lactate" in astrocytes. As the theory goes, this impairs immediate response to cognitive demands due to a lack of sufficient ATP for "rapidly firing neurons," and also affects development of the brain by impairing myelination on longer time scales. Abstract here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/16925830/

I'm quite interested in how ketosis can be therapeutic for neurological/cognitive issues in general, and how it might ameliorate ADHD symptoms in particular - there appears to be some experimental evidence (at least in rat models) that it might do the latter. There also appears to be experimental evidence that ketosis increases levels of lactate in the brain: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/11043913/

My question: if the theory proposed in the first link above is correct, would it be reasonable to think that a ketogenic diet might eliminate ADHD symptoms by addressing the lactate supply issue? Obviously the effects of years of impaired myelination would still be present, but could ketosis resolve the more immediate energy-supply issue and also possibly improve myelination going forward?

# Answer
> 4 votes
Whether or not there is truth to this theory, a ketogenic diet cannot 'eliminate ADHD symptoms'. ADHD is an impairment of executive functioning. Executive dysfunction is thought to be linked to a deficit in dopamine, as well as functional frontal lobe pathology. (1) There are certainly other theories as to what causes the disorder, and they are likely a byproduct of how broad a net the traditional ADHD 'symptoms list' seems to cast.

There is no doubt that lactate is important. Recent evidence may suggest that lactate is preferentially metabolized over glucose by neurons in the brain. (2) However, while low lactate levels might produce behavioral effects that imitate those of ADHD, there is no evidence to suggest that the disorder itself can be traced to lactate levels in the brain. One way that we can observe this is by measuring executive functioning ability and lactate levels in humans as the result of acute exercise, since exercise is observed to raise lactate levels. This study shows that:

> ...While acute exercise improved all aspects of executive functions in those without ADHD, acute exercise only improved inhibitory performance for those with ADHD.

Thus, it does not look like the cure you are looking for is found in ketosis, assuming that it is the lactate you are monitoring (and also assuming that a ketogenoc diet does not raise lactate levels by a hyperincreased amount relative to that generated through rigorous exercise). Furthermore, the Wikipedia page for ketosis cites several sources that suggest that a ketogenic diet may be unhealthy, and even fatal if done improperly (4). But that last bit exceeds the scope of your question, so I'll leave you to look into that if you so desire.

EDIT: Forgot to tackle the myelination issue, which seems to be a big part of your question, as well. Decreased myelination appears to lend itself toward addictive behaviors, and may worsen existing disorders through psychopathological means, but does not seem to cause the disorders themselves. An increase in myelination may help regulate symptoms, but cannot cure the sufferer of the disorder or eliminate the symptoms entirely, which seems to be what you are asking about. (5) (6) A well-balanced diet that supports the strengthening of myelin (i.e. Omega 3) is often a method of regulation for ADHD sufferers, but is not the rule.

---
Tags: neuroscience, adhd
---


# Question
Title: What is the relationship between perceived difficulty and mistakes/errors?
I'm looking for any empirical research about the correlation between the perceived difficulty level of humans and the mistake / errors they make while performing a task.

I would prefer studies with longer/more realistic tasks compared to simple task performed in the lab. I would also prefer studies in the field of software engineering.

So far I could only find one study in this direction:

Varying task difficulty in the Go/Nogo task: The effects of inhibitory control, arousal, and perceived effort on ERP components

Are there others with longer/more realistic tasks?

# Answer
Here is an article that seems to describe what you are looking for. The researchers sought to test factors that influence the performance of software engineers. To quote from the abstract:

> Goal difficulty has a negative relationship to performance but a positive relationship to effort. Because of this off-setting effect, the degree of goal difficulty has a relatively small overall effect on performance. Goal clarity also has a relatively small effect on performance. Individual ability has the strongest direct effect on perceived performance, more than twice as strong as the effects of work effort, personality dimensions, and perceived characteristics of the task. High achievement needs were directly related to both effort and perceived performance, whereas self-esteem and locus of control have a direct relationship to perceived performance

In summary, it looks like an increase in perceived task difficulty lends itself to an increase in effort, but not overall task performance. Perceived performance is strongly tied to the individual's self-esteem and locus of control.

EDIT: I forgot to mention this in my original post, but you might find it useful to know that there is also research on effort level relative to task difficulty. This study assigned computer tasks that ranged in difficulty, and then gave participants high or low levels of reinforcement for performance on the task. The participants then were given an anagram task to measure performance.

> ...individuals who were highly reinforced for performance on the low-difficulty computer task spent less time persisting on the subsequent anagram task, demonstrating that the low level of effort generalized to another activity. Additionally, individuals who were given low levels of reinforcement for performance on the moderately high-difficulty computer task spent more time persisting on the anagram task. This demonstrated that the effort exerted on the first task, paired with low levels of reinforcement, generalized to the following task. However, participants who were given the highest-difficulty computer tasks did not generalize this effort. According to the researchers, this version of the task was so difficult that the participants could not succeed and thus demonstrated a pattern of behaviors similar to learned helplessness.
> 2 votes

---
Tags: cognitive-psychology
---


# Question
Title: How is brain processing different for situation-less vs. situated emotional faces?
In traditional emotional face perception paradigms, participants are shown circle cut-outs of emotional faces. All context has been removed. Participants only see the face.

However, it's well established that how we perceive emotional faces depends largely on context. For example, Barrett, Mesquita, & Gendron (2011) point out that Serena William's face in the first picture looks to be in pain, but in the second picture she's clearly ecstatic from victory.

To the best of our knowledge, how does our brain differentially process (e.g., which brain regions are recruited for) the emotional faces in these two pictures?

Edit: To be clear, I'm familiar with psychological theories of emotion face processing (and why we perceive these faces differently). I'm more interested in the brain level of analysis.

# Answer
> 4 votes
Alright, it's high time I actually answer this question. Beatrice de Gelder and crew published two papers that examined this with fMRI (here) and EEG (here).

## fMRI study

In the fMRI study, they presented participants with emotional faces against threatening and neutral backgrounds, with various controls (a triangle, a scrambled background).

The results are kind of complex and lengthy, so I'll quote the authors' summary:

> \[W\]e found no evidence of brain areas responding more to faces in a threatening background than to faces in a neutral background \[…\]. On the other hand, the **sgACC** and **right anterior PPA** responded more to neutral than to threatening backgrounds surrounding faces \[…\]. Additionally, the results show that while similar background effects also obtain on bodies in the right anterior PPA, **the effect in sgACC is face-specific and furthermore correlates with empathic ability**: higher empathy scores are related to smaller background effects on faces.

They suggest that activation of the **sgACC** represents mentalizing processes. Faces in a neutral background might make participants attribute certain thoughts to the figures ("What is he thinking?"). On the other hand, faces against a threatening background might elicit "orienting responses" (e.g., "What is going on?").

The **right anterior PPA** is involved in topographic processing, which may be inhibited by the presence of a face. Inhibition may be greater for threatening vs. neutral scenes.

The **left FG** was also active, which may be involved in "processing the affective face-context congruency."

## EEG study

The goal of the EEG study was to examine the temporal dynamics of perceiving discrete emotions against complex, affective scenes.

Again, the results are relatively complex, so I'll quote the abstract:

> Fear perception elicited significant activity at the earliest time segments, followed by disgust, happiness, and sadness. Moreover, fear, disgust, and happiness were characterized by two time segments of significant activity, whereas sadness showed only one long-latency time segment of activity.

Above (the yellow part) you can see how emotions are not represented continuously in the brain across time and how the type of emotion being processed may be differentiable.

They also attempted to localize the temporal activity in the brain, and they found widely distributed activity for fear (mostly RH), disgust (mostly RH), and happiness (mostly LH), and more limited activation for sadness. For example, see the results for fear\>neutral localization below:

However, no brain area was unique to the perception of a specific emotion. Instead, there was lots of overlapping brain activity (which supports a constructionist approach to emotions).

Overall, I'm not sure either of these studies satisfactorily elucidate how we perceive emotional faces in different scenes, but they're a great start.

---
Tags: emotion, cognitive-neuroscience
---


# Question
Title: How can psychometric or behavioural tests be used in banking to evaluate creditworthiness?
Suppose an entrepreneur or borrower with little credit or business history goes to a bank or some financial institution to borrow money.

Banks can use, as an alternative to a credit or business history, 'psychometric' or 'behavioural' tests.

What are some 'psychometric' or 'behavioural' tests used to gauge creditworthiness of a potential borrower with limited credit history? Where can I read more about these (eg some articles, what kind of articles or journals, keywords to google)?

# Answer
Not really my area of expertise, but I find that a very interesting question and googled a bit for answers.

EFL (Entrepreneurial Finance Lab) is a for-profit company claiming to be the market leader in psychometric loan scoring. The company has been spun out of a research project of the Center of International Development at Harvard University. EFL's method has been covered in a number of media reports (e.g., here and here).

The basic idea is to apply psychometric data as the basis for determining whether to give micro-finance loans to would-be entrepreneurs in developing countries. In such emerging markets, traditional credit scoring used in industrialized nations are either not available or less reliable. If it works psychometrics might help to give loans to entrepreneurs who are less likely to default and thereby fight poverty in a more efficient way.

Given that this is a proprietary test, it is difficult to get detailed information about the kind of data that is used. According to the news reports and the company website, they assess **fluid intelligence**, certain **attitudes and beliefs** that are predictive of entrepreneurial success (e.g., locus of control), concrete **business skills**, and **ethics and honesty**. Part of these data rely on self-report questions, others seem use more behavioral data (e.g., performance in intelligence tasks or risk games).

To predict creditworthiness, they use Bayesian hierarchical modeling. From what I gather, initially, they used data from meta-analyses of predictors of entrepreneurial success as input (e.g., Rauch & Frese, 2007). Now, they seem to use their own data for model-building.

A source for more information on how this works may be a book that has been published by the founders of EFL (Klinger, Khwaja, & del Carpio, 2013). Citing from an abstract of chapter 2 of the book:

> Regarding the **Big 5 personality traits**, extroversion is found to be strongly related to higher profit levels, with weaker relationships for agreeableness (positive) and conscientiousness (negative).
>
> Interestingly, **integrity** is found to have a weak negative relationship with profits: the most honest entrepreneurs aren't the most honest (sic). Conversely, when considering default risk, the lowest risk entrepreneurs also tend to score higher on the integrity assessment, as well as register higher levels of conscientiousness.
>
> **Digit span** (fluid intelligence), controlling for level of education, is negatively related to profit levels, but is not related to default risk.
>
> **When combined**, these relationships with conscientiousness, honesty, and level of education have an AUC (a common metric of credit score predictive power) of 0.57 – 0.66, which is not extraordinarily strong when compared to credit scoring models in high - information countries and market segments, but it is **sufficient to add significant value to the risk analysis** task facing banks lending to SMEs in emerging markets.
>
> We show that for one of the sample banks, risk of default for low-scoring clients is 50% higher than it is for high-scoring clients. Furthermore, we show that these **results can be improved by customizing models to each country and financial institution**, which isn't surprising given the cultural differences between Peru, Colombia, Kenya and South Africa. While traditional methods of model building suffer challenges of doing this customization without large amounts of data, new methodologies such as Bayesian methods are shown to offer promise to improve results even further, making customization without over-fitting possible and further strengthening the case for using psychometric tools for credit risk analysis.

An obvious question is whether this type of assessment can be **gamed** by malicious borrowers and loan officers (who tell their customers how they think they should answer to get the loan). EFL says they take various measures to prevent that (e.g., checking whether certain loan officers cause unlikely patterns of responses for their clients, randomization of responses, analyzing questions that have no obvious "right" answer, etc.).

The company claims to by highly successful in improving the quality of loan decisions by presenting a series of case studies. Nevertheless, given that this is a for-profit company and all analyses take place behind closed doors, it might be prudent to take this information with a **grain of salt**.

**References**

Klinger, B., Khwaja, A. I., & del Carpio, C. (2013). Enterprising Psychometrics and Poverty Reduction. SpringerBriefs in Psychology. New York, NY: Springer New York. Retrieved from http://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-1-4614-7227-8

Rauch, A., & Frese, M. (2007). Let’s put the person back into entrepreneurship research: A meta-analysis on the relationship between business owners’ personality traits, business creation, and success. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 16, 353–385. doi:10.1080/13594320701595438
> 5 votes

---
Tags: measurement, reference-request, consumer-psychology, behavior, behavioral-economics
---


# Question
Title: What is happening when i focus my attention on a particular body part?
In an article i saw that "Thinking about an activity can actually activate the parts linking to that activity". So i thought of giving it a try and i started to focus on the digits of my feet (they are the reflex points to head and neck), and strangely my head felt light and the stress in my neck was gone. I tried the same with other reflex points too and the results are the same as if i'm applying pressure with my fingers. So what is actually happening in this process?

# Answer
> 0 votes
**Short answer: You are discovering your bodymind.**

You might want to look into trigger point therapy and myofascial release as Western complements to the Eastern reflex points that you mention. I seem to recall "tensegrity" as a bodywork term describing the human tendency to form an identity/integrity from the structure of interconnected tension in various parts of the body.

Trigger point therapy, myofascial release, and other forms of bodywork deconstruct a person's tensegrity. So do solo exercise modalities like yoga and meditation. **Your mental exercise may have been discovering tensegrity between your toes and your head and neck.**

The reflexes you describe will probably go away if you continue to do the exercise regularly. Think of the analogy of opening a window to let cool air inside so that you stop sweating.

In addition to simply thinking about a body part, you can also tense it and then release it in what yoga people call bandhas. And you can imagine sending breath to a body part.

All these methods redirect blood flow and neural activity to the targeted body part, which triggers whatever reflexes are connected to the body part. Some of the reflexes are autonomic.

Papers have been written documenting the ability of advanced yoga practitioners to consciously control the behavior of their autonomic nervous system, including slowing down their heart, etc. Yogi Coudoux introduced a lot of westerners to this with his television demonstrations during the 1970s. You can Google Yogi Coudoux.

The reflexes that you may have triggered may simply be the first step in a progressively greater ability to control your body if you continue bodymind exercise.

---
Tags: attention, concentration
---


# Question
Title: How to train our brain to see everything in slow motion?
People who had near death experience often found that they were able to see everything in slow motion and capture every details in their surrounding at that particular period. Because the brain process a lot of information at that time due to adrenaline in the blood to aid our chances of survival. So is there a way to train the brain to increase its processing capacity so we can perceive things like mentioned above all the time.

# Answer
> 1 votes
Here is an article that explains that the time warp during near death experiences is an illusion. http://www.livescience.com/2117-time-slow-emergencies.html In such situations, the mind captures more memories of the event. "And the more memory you have of an event, the longer you believe it took."

---
Tags: vision, brain-training
---


# Question
Title: What is the relationship between dopamine and mathematical ability (if any)?
I am curious to know if there is any existing literature that suggests that an increase in dopamine lends itself to an increased interest in solving problems of a mathematical nature.

# Answer
> 4 votes
A study **Evidence that methylphenidate enhances the saliency of a mathematical task by increasing dopamine in the human brain** suggests that using of Methylphenidate that is prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) increases the performance in mathematical tasks in healthy subjects. Methylphenidate primarily acts as a dopamine-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor.

> Methylphenidate, when coupled with the mathematical task, significantly increased extracellular dopamine, but this did not occur when coupled with the neutral task. The mathematical task did not increase dopamine when coupled with placebo. Subjective reports about interest and motivation in the mathematical task were greater with methylphenidate than with placebo and were associated with dopamine increases.

---
Tags: dopamine
---


# Question
Title: Is there any connection between visual processing ability and social skills?
I suspect there is a connection because visual processing ability is necessary in noticing important subtle social cues.

# Answer
> 1 votes
Reading facial expressions is very important to understand others' intentions (Heise, 1985).

> Recent research indicates that (1) the human face is a highly sophisticated signaling system for communicating affect, and (2) affect plays a key role in the experience of social organization and in the day-by-day production of culture. This essay suggests that emotional displays—on the face especially—are a primary means of socialization, allowing a neophyte to attain knowledge of the sociocultural system rapidly and efficiently.

Having a visual impairment may yield difficulties in socializing (at least in child in the Autism Spectrum Disorder) (Hellendoorn, et al, 2013):

> This study suggests that visual perception may be a mechanism in the development of interpersonal relationships in ASD, which is in accordance with an embodied approach to social cognition.

...and in schizophrenia cases, as per @what comment (Sergi et al, 2006):

> Social cognition appears to be a key determinant of functional status in schizophrenia. Using a very basic measure of visual perception, the present study found that social perception mediates the influence of early visual processing on functional status in schizophrenia.

Other indirect consequences may happen due to behavior related to some visual disorder. Vision problems and social skills (note: not a peer-reviewed article):

> Vision problems also affect social interaction. Your child might appear awkward, clumsy, or other children may complain that he is invading their personal space, because he has trouble with spatial and body awareness and depth perception. The other children might treat him differently because he has developed coping habits, such as constantly rubbing his eyes, squinting, or tilting his head, or because he often complains of headaches or nausea. He may become distracted while talking or ignore the rhythm of a conversation and other social cues. Children or other parents might unfairly judge this behavior as unmannerly or inconsiderate.
>
> Dealing with difficulty in school, awkwardness in social settings, poor performance in physical activities, and strained relationships with parents is a lot for a child to handle. While children with other learning disabilities may excel in sports or sociability, vision problems interfere more often beyond the classroom. Falling behind academically and being treated differently by peers and adults can lead to low self-esteem and withdrawal.

# Answer
> 0 votes
Yes there is relation, but currently there is no research evidences. its theoretical. As you can observe we at according to situation and its demands. with passage of time our social skills improved and we also learn new skills in such way.

---
Tags: social-cognition
---


# Question
Title: Research that shows that people infer causation from correlation
It is well known and frquently quoted that "correlation does not imply causation".

Nonetheless, I've scoured the wikipedia article "Correlation does not imply causation" and the relevant keywords in google scholar, and could not find any research that clearly shows that people use correlation to infer causation. There are some examples from popular newspapers and mentions of "cum hoc ergo propter hoc" as a long known fallacy, but no empirical research.

Is there any research that shows that people have a "correlation implies causation" fallacy?

# Answer
> 4 votes
A much-cited reference on the statistical backgrounds is this one:

A more recent, open access but applied research paper on the topic is:

---
Tags: decision-making
---


# Question
Title: Can humans really successfully multitask?
It seems to be a quality parents want to instill in their children, as well as i.e.- teenagers bragging about having music playing, texting, video chatting, all while doing homework, they claim is the best possible atmosphere; for getting their school work done....

# Answer
"Trying to do two things at once is usually a recipe for doing both badly, according to a long line of research. We’re slower and less accurate when we try to juggle two things."

Generally, it is thought that multi-tasking is just the brain rapidly shifting its focus from one matter to another instead of doing both (or several) things simultaneously. This is very straining and distracting for the brain, and so it ends up doing less well on both tasks than it would if the tasks were done separately.https://www.apa.org/research/action/multitask.aspx

However, there is an interesting article that says there might be more going on that that. The article explains 2 studies done that seem to indicate that our ability to perform a task might depend on the context in which we learnt to perform the task. E.g. " If you’re typing while listening to a conference call, maybe you’re less likely to make mistakes if you were equally distracted when you originally learned to type." https://hbr.org/2015/01/the-curious-science-of-when-multitasking-works
> 1 votes

# Answer
People have a tendency to get distracted during mundane tasks that are not immediately rewarding. They counteract this by doing things that are immediately rewarding, such as answering a text, listening to music, or checking Facebook notifications. We tend to repeat behaviors that feed the pleasure center of our brain, and thus we learn associate certain behaviors with pleasure (and feel encouraged to continue repeating them once they are determined as 'pleasurable' behaviors). For this reason, we may keep coming back to things that have been pleasurable in the past, and all the more better if that thing can retrieve the pleasure in a relatively quick period of time (i.e. music, Facebook, versus exercise or reading a good novel). There is evidence for this in the phenomenon known as 'conditioned place preference', which is a person's conditioned preference for places that they associate with high reward, and an aversion to places that remind them of negative or traumatizing events. In those who take stimulant medication (medications that tackle the 'reward' center of the brain), there appears to be a developed conditioned place preference for the area(s) where the medication is taken. \[1\]

That being said, it may be that children need these distractions in order to increase their intrinsic motivation to focus on tasks that are not immediately rewarding. In that sense, this form of multitasking can be seen as helpful. The problem steps in when you have people who are intolerant to unpleasant stimuli (i.e. people who naturally have low activity in their pleasure centers). These people may find it difficult to multitask because they may struggle to focus on one thing long enough to understand it. They may also demonstrate impulsive behaviors due to lack of control over their reward center (and, by proxy, their motivation). \[2\]

The optimal learning state is considered to be that of flow, colloquially known as being 'in the zone'. This occurs when

> a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by complete absorption in what one does.

The suggestion behind such a mental state is that the person is singularly focused on the task at hand. Therefore, it may be less that multi-tasking increases one's ability to perform well in school; rather, it may be that the ability to achieve a sense of singular-minded focus on one task at a time may put you in a better position to accomplish more in a shorter amount of time. In this sense, it isn't how much the student can do at once, but how much the student can accomplish in a set time period that may determine their success in school.

---

Sources:

\[1\] Tzschentke, T.(2007). Measuring reward with the conditioned place preference(CPP) paradigm: update of the last decade. Addiction Biology. 12, 227-462.

\[2\] Grant JE, Potenza MN (2004). "Impulse Control Disorders: Clinical Characteristics and Pharmacological Management". Annals of Clinical Psychiatry 16 (1): 27–34.
> 0 votes

---
Tags: cognitive-psychology, decision-making, attention
---


# Question
Title: Why would I be asked to count backwards by 3, from 100 in a psychological test?
On an initial mental health consultation with a psychiatric nurse practitioner, I was asked, among many other odd questions, to count backwards by three. 100, 97, 94...

This was quite a number of years ago and I've often wondered what the purpose behind this question was, and what some of the the other curious questions accomplish. I have my suspicions, but I'm not certain.

What's a baker's dozen? What do you think "people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones" means?

Thanks

# Answer
> Why would I be asked to count backwards by 3, from 100 in a psychological test?

This is to test your cognitive reasoning abilities, particularly your ability to concentrate and recall serial information. Similar tests are administered to injured sports players to ensure that they do not have a concussion.

> What's a baker's dozen? What do you think "people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones" means?

This is used to test your ability to handle abstraction in language. One symptom of autism is an inability to understand metaphorical significance of language in non-literal terms. While the average adult would understand that the second sentence is a proverb (and can infer its meaning even without context), an autistic adult might interpret the sentence literally, i.e. 'people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones because their parents might get mad at them.'
> 3 votes

---
Tags: measurement, abnormal-psychology, intelligence, test, neurology
---