title: Solving for HR and FAR, given ACC and C

text:
# Question
Title: Solving for HR and FAR, given ACC and C
Lets say I have an equal variance SDT framework with an equal number of target present and target absent trials:

$d'=Z^{-1}(HR)-Z^{-1}(FAR)$

$C=\frac{Z^{-1}(HR)+Z^{-1}(FAR)}{-2}$

$ACC=\frac{HR+(1-FAR)}{2}$

where $HR=$ hit rate, $FAR=$ false alarm rate, $d'=$ sensitivity, $C=$ bias, and $ACC=$ accuracy.

If I know the value of $C$ and $ACC$, how do I solve for $HR$ and $FAR$?

To put it another way. In ROC space, I know my iso-bias curve and I know my iso-accuracy curve, and I want to know the coordinates where they intersect in terms of $HR$ and $FAR$.

It seems that I should take my equations for $C$ and $ACC$ in terms of $HR$ and $FAR$, and work them to give me $HR$ and $FAR$ in terms of $C$ and $ACC$, but I haven't managed to successfully untangle the inverse CDFs in order to do that.

**Edit:**

I can rearrange the equation for $ACC$, to express $FAR$ in terms of $HR$ and $ACC$:

$FAR=HR+1-2ACC$

And then I can plug that into the equation for $C$:

$C=\frac{Z^{-1}(HR)+Z^{-1}(HR+1-2ACC)}{-2}$

And rearrange that a bit:

$Z^{-1}(HR)=-2C-Z^{-1}(HR+1-2ACC)$

And then I could do this:

$HR=Z(-2C-Z^{-1}(HR+1-2ACC))$

And then I get stuck, because I'm not sure how to "free" the $HR$ buried on the right-hand side.

# Answer
> 1 votes
I tried to do the math and got stuck. I asked for help at math.se and didn't get any further. My thinking is that it is not possible to write down a nice simple answer even though it is two equations and two unknowns, since system is not linear. When faced with math I cannot do, sometimes it is easier to just bring out the MATLAB hammer:

```
function [HR, FAR] = findHRFAR(c, acc)
    ACC = @(HR, FAR)(HR+1-FAR)./2;
    C = @(HR, FAR)(norminv(HR)+norminv(FAR))./2;

    HR = fminbnd(@(HR)temp(HR, c, acc), 0, 1);
    [SSE, FAR] = temp(HR, c, acc);

    [HR, FAR, C(HR, FAR), ACC(HR, FAR), SSE]

    function [SSE, FAR] = temp(HR, c, acc)
        [FAR, SSE] = fminbnd(@(FAR)((c-C(HR, FAR)).^2)+...
            ((acc-ACC(HR, FAR)).^2), 0, 1);
    end
end

```

It runs pretty fast, but ... the nested bounded optimization is ugly, and there may be a more efficient way to find the answer. I also don't see any reason this could not be done in Octave, Python, or any similar type program of your choice.

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Tags: psychophysics, signal-detection
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title: Looking for a paper: AI in human host

text:
# Question
Title: Looking for a paper: AI in human host
I am searching for a paper where participants were confronted with a (female) person, who gave answers according to a computer algorithm. She had an earpiece that gave her the answers and was trained to simultaneously listen and speak.

Some participants thought that she was acting a bit off, but none recognized that they are talking to a computer. I think the aim of the study was some sort of turing test.

Hope anyone can help me find it. I don't know how to look for it anymore...

# Answer
> 3 votes
Finally!

I found a news article explaining the **Echoborg**. The research was done in 2015 by Kevin Corti and Alex Gillespi at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Published at Frontiers of Psychology: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00634

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Tags: reference-request, language, artificial-intelligence
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# Question
Title: Questions of the type "What do you think he/she would think?"
For a study in the adoption of new technology, my student and I are developing a questionnaire that will poll respondents on their opinions of what their colleagues would think about benefits/problems of adopting a particular technology. This is research in social science/business but not strictly psychology, and as we are not psychologists, we don't know the literature.

Have psychologists investigated questions of the type *What do you think other people would think?* We are not asking for a tutorial here, just a pointer where should we should start looking.

# Answer
> 0 votes
As an active participant in Cross Validated/SE, I know the importance of a question having an answer -- even an answer that kicks the can down the road -- so that visitors to the site can see that a question is not as hopeless as a message in a bottle, but rather aspires to be a shout from a tenement window, where you know that someone, somewhere will shout back.

Call it an echo, but I'm shouting back at myself. In topical area, my question regards organizational behavior, but the spirit of my question is game theoretic, and I think the body of literature I am searching for is in game theory in organziations -- every over-achiever's favorite sport! To that end, Zhu and Weynant (2003), looks promising . . . ?

And while it is only tangentially relevant, I think I might prime the pump of other responders by citing the most famous *what-do-you-think-he-thinks?* problem of all time: *The Room with Two Doors*.

\[OK, that was a spoiler, but really you should seek your chuckles elsewhere. We're doing research here! ;) \]

<sub> Zhu, K., & Weyant, J. P. (2003). Strategic decisions of new technology adoption under asymmetric information: a game‐theoretic model. Decision sciences, 34(4), 643-675. </sub>

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Tags: social-psychology, reference-request
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# Question
Title: Can autistic savants beat computers in known computationally hard problems?
I'm always amazed when the exceptional mathematical skills of some autistic-savant people hit the news. My question is: can they outperform a computer in problems which we believe too hard for even a computer to solve?

Of course I haven't heard that any of them could. But I'm not sure if that's because they fundamentally can't or just no one bothered to ask them right questions.

For example if I ask:

> Sir, can you tell me which two integer numbers I need to multiply to get this huge number?
>
> 30885595542097078048530024995687899997024041750973847393477559897447391573878575270082706367139186728487020986897882643061865394945737579541836152606087611656762824124167456134969494253726435638776260179938318355412387553479545957502637298284851360234398784003069626709425392069487597686079260312041858526437519290451126677173785415389420329825181564012716675865830263098249948022195474980538298331998208615558178711421936619071576025836780179671597012185469978359221693046590783292027645460672357953215860301121762021294392026714148819989367905598842533973708083447918228276991009085148912935055442293643589623179239

Any chance they can ever come up with a correct answer?

It would be a world sensation if they could as the number above is the RSA 2048 bit SSL public key modulus of a website. Which is currently believed to be secure enough (no computers can break it in reasonable amount of time). And integer factorization is a know hard problem and the entire RSA cryptosystem depend on it.

# Answer
> 1 votes
People easily solve cognition, but number crunching isn't what the brain's optimized for. Current generation hardware easily beat any savant at numbers due to their optimization and clock speed. Look at this and this on hashing. The brain simply can't beat these things (trivial?), let alone with harder problems?

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Tags: savant-syndrome
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# Question
Title: Why can't human thoughts be stored in metals?
1. As metals are good conductors of electricity and they can be charged by the electrical activity of thoughts, why can't human thoughts be stored in metals?
2. Why thoughts cannot be stored in the form of charges in the metal?

# Answer
First off, you mention 'metals'. What is a metal?

* In common speech, a metal is a shiny material that conducts electricity and heat well.
* In physics, a metal is regarded as a substance capable of conducting electricity at zero Kelvin. Many elements and compounds become metallic under high pressures, for instance iodine. Reversely, the metal sodium becomes a nonmetal at a pressure of just under two million times atmospheric pressure.
* In chemistry, nearly all elements (around 95 of the 118 elements in the periodic table, dependent on the definition used) are metals.
* In astrophysics the term metal is even more broad, referring to all elements in a star that are heavier than hydrogen and helium.

Assuming you refer to the colloquial term of metals, then well-conducting materials are in fact useless to store information. In electronical memory **semiconductors** are used, because memory elements, like nerve cells, need an 'on' and 'off' state at room temperature. Well-conducting metals conduct electricity always, so it's hard to switch them off. Reversely, insulators don't conduct currents, as you can't switch them on. Semiconductors are therefore used, which are inermediate conductors (source: UCSB).

Silicon (Si) is a prime example of a semiconductor. According to the Chemistry definition, Silicon isn't a metal at all, it's a metalloid, *i.e.*, an element somehwere in-between metals and non-metal (source: Chemistry LibreTexts).
> 6 votes

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Tags: neuroscience, cognitive-neuroscience, memory, neural-network, brain
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# Question
Title: Can stress be sustained without reflective thought processes
My question is whether the feeling of stress goes away progressively in the absence of reflective thought.

Example: you notice someone looking at you and think "maybe I have something on my face". Let us assume that this produces stress. If you do not use your internal dialog or any kind of visualization etc., is there any way that the stress can continue/grow or will it inevitably subside?

Has there been any research on this?

# Answer
> 3 votes
In your example, you are describing social stress. I think you are right that social stress is mainly driven by reflective processes. Also, social stress without reflective processes sounds quite implausible to me.

However, we should keep in mind that stress can come from various sources, some of which are non-social. For example, one common way to induce stress in psychological experiments is to use a physiological (as opposed to a psychosocial) stressor. In the classic cold pressor test, participants are instructed to put their hand into ice water. This starts a stress reaction, as measureable for example by increases in cortisol. I think it's pretty safe to say that reflective processes are not the driving factor here.

For a review on different methods to induce stress in the lab, see for example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181831/

# Answer
> 0 votes
Stress is the release of an adrenaline. The release of an adrenaline could make stress grow in the absence of cognitive mental processing. People who are vulnerable to stress may experience stress for longer and greater extent than people who are less vulnerable to stress (People who genetically vulnerable to stress could develop a psychotic disorder. People who drink a lot of caffeine or lack in sleep could be more susceptible to subtle stress triggers).

Stress may go as far as a panic attack. The human brain and physiology will act to subside it (I don't know enough physiology to tell you about the mechanisms of adrenaline in the body, but I do know that the brain will block some of the visual cues perceived to prevent psychological trauma and by doing so avoid extra stress).

Classical conditioning could lead to more stress than usual if the person who experienced the event associated it with something more stressful.

# Answer
> -2 votes
I'm not certain on research regarding this issue. However, if I were to propose a hypothesis...

* Given: Stress is the immediate reaction to a perceived potential or immediate threat.
* Given: The initial recognition of the stressor triggers the fight(address), flight(avoid), freeze response.
* Given: Success of the fight response requires resolution or conversion of the stressor into a non or less stressing condition.
* Given: Success of the flight response requires removal of one's self from the effect of the stressor, usually by means of escape or devaluation of the stressor itself.
* Given: The freeze response leaves one trapped in the conflict state, unable to take action.
* Given: Both the fight and freeze responses keeps one actively reflecting on the stressor until the stressor has been resolved, converted, removed, or devalued.
* Therefore: only the flight response offers the opportunity to not reflect on the stressor in the presence of the stressor by diminishing its value as a stressor.

Conclusion - Since the only way to eliminate reflective thought in the presence of a stressor is to devalue the stressor, It's more accurate to say that the feeling of stress goes away **because** of reflective thought rather than in the absence of it. In fact, any presence of a stressor necessarily precludes the possibility of an absence of reflective thought. Put another way, the human mind literally spends all day processing fight/flight/freeze responses over its entire list of impending stressors in order of priority. Everything we do is a matter of processing the importance of resolving a particular stress immediately.

So a better question would be: Is it possible to be absent of reflective thought in the presence of a stressor?

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, emotion
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title: Measuring improvement in 3D tasks

text:
# Question
Title: Measuring improvement in 3D tasks
I have been teaching 3D design for a while, and i have noticed that a small group has decidedly hard time coping with rotation of the virtual camera. Unfortunately designing in 3D on a screen requires you to do quite a lot of mental rotation. Instead would like to setup a test to see if a VR setup would alleviate the problem on a individual level.

Now i am aware of this near duplicate, that says men score better. But its not entirely fair in this case, as many of the problem cases are male. In either case i am looking for what improvement can get done on a personal level by optimizing the tools to the user, notwithstanding the general trend of the masses.

How do begin to designing the test for measurement of improvement?

# Answer
> 3 votes
> *How do \[I\] design \[a\] test for measurement of \[3D rotation\] improvement?*

The way to start is to define what you wish to measure.

* What needs to be mentally rotated?
* Why does it need mental rotation?
* What goal needs to be reached by the task?
* Are the tasks a matter of correct or incorrect, or is it a graded measure?

Only then can you start thinking about the question proper, namely how performance can be measured.

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Tags: test, spatial-cognition
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# Question
Title: Name for a condition where one with their limited knowledge thinks of a problem as bigger than it really is?
I know about Dunning-Kruger... where to put it bluntly, one overestimates oneself.

I am looking for a definition/name, to further research and reference in discussions with my peers, for a bias, that defines the following behavior:

* The person A has knowledge X in a field Y.
* The person estimates a problem in the field Y as being of complexity Z.
* Though, another person - B, in the field Y, having knowledge greater than X, sees Z as a much lesser problem or not a problem at all.
    + Implying that it's not worth solving, or that solution to a greater problem automatically solves the lesser one.

Of course, given that person B estimation is unbiased, therefore *objective*.

For example, I'm a software engineer with fair amount of experience and I can freely speculate (make educated guesses) about problems/solutions in fields outside of my immediate proficiency.

If, given the knowledge I have, I would estimate a problem in this outside field as generally/*objectively* BIG where people actually inside the field would not.

How is the condition called? (Assuming it's already defined)

This somehow might be related to Confirmation bias, but I do not commit to action, I abstain from it, because I see it as much too complex for me to tackle.

# Answer
> 2 votes
I can't provide you with a direct term that you are looking for. However, I think the ***level of confidence*** comes close.

My reasoning is as follows: **Experience**/knowledge increases **task proficiency** (Kuhlthau, 1999). Proficiency affects the level of **confidence**. Confidence, in turn, affects the perceived **task complexity** (Chang, 2005).

<sub>**References**
**-** Kuhlthau, *JASIST* (1999); **50**(5): 399-412
**-** Chang, *Computers Human Behav* (2005); **21**(5): 713-28</sub>

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Tags: terminology, bias
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# Question
Title: What is the exact chemical reaction that gives consciousness?
Something very bizarre is consciousness, it is our ability to virtually feel things such as emotions and ability to control our thoughts and physical movement.

We can also imagine a non-conscious being who does everything as a result of an equation just like modern computers or plants, which exist but it doesn't know that it exists.

Religious people might believe that a supernatural object called SOUL might reside in the body! which allows it to feel from the brain.

or perhaps the SOUL is consciousness itself, if we have to define consciousness by some physical entity does it not mean that, our consciousness is fake, everything I will do in my life is the result of the cosmic equation that made everything possible?

If consciousness is a firing of some neurons in a loop, which is nothing but atoms, how do we feel alive........

# Answer
The primary issue is defining what you mean by "conciousness". Even from reading your attempts to do so in your question, one can see that this is quite difficult: does it mean self-awareness? intelligence? a "soul"?

It is impossible to determine a "chemical reaction for consciousness", because there is no agreed upon definition of "consciousness" and how to measure it, or for most of the other terms used to define it such as "self-awareness" or "intelligence". It's impossible to study the chemistry of something when you can't even define what it is.

We generally can't break down complex psychological processes into simple chemical equations anyway. Psychology is an interplay between bio-chemical/physical processes, shared environmental factors, unique individual life history, social/cultural dynamics, etc. Any form of "conciousness" evolves as a collective result of all of these, and is not something that lends itself to simple formal representations.
> 1 votes

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Tags: neuroscience, cognitive-neuroscience
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# Question
Title: Is there a research on correlation between honesty and success?
Did anyone do a research on corelation between honesty and success, establishing individual's honesty through a provocative experiment and comparing it with his/her salary amount, satisfaction of achievement etc? Or anything close to that?

# Answer
> 3 votes
No provocative experiment needed. Some of the major taxonomies within personality psychology have well-validated measures for honesty, and have been used in massive samples that could already address this question. I would start by doing a search on Google Scholar for those measures and the types of success you mention. E.g.,

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honesty-humility\_factor\_of\_the\_HEXACO\_model\_of\_personality

Notice that the trait most often associated with success is Conscientiousness, which may include an aspect of honesty:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientiousness

# Answer
> 1 votes
To add to the existing answer, honesty-humility is a major factor in the HEXACO framework of personality.

There is a comprehensive list of papers using the HEXACO framework here organised under a wide range of headings: http://hexaco.org/references

My sense of the literature is that honesty-humility in the HEXACO framework is related more to ethical behaviour and lower levels of deviant behaviour (e.g., counterproductive work behaviours, criminality, deviance, etc.), as well as lower levels of self-interest and egotism.

I don't think it has a major direct relationship with success and achievement, at least empirically. But I haven't reviewed the literature.

Theoretically, deviant behaviour would often reduce life success. Getting fired, damaging your reputation, going to prison, getting expelled from school, and so on. However, also, some degree of self-interest may also assist in personal achievement. Furthermore, it may just be that it's not the most relevant dimension of personality: i.e., conscientiousness and abilities are probably more related to achievement.

# Answer
> 1 votes
(This answer your question only partially).

Honesty and success are made of many things. Quite a bunch of studies found interesting correlations between honesty and success at the collective/cultural level. (They measure the success in term of wealth, trust, quality of the institution, rights, etc.).

Just a sample to give an idea:

● Edward C. Banfield (1958) shows some correlation between many aspects of honesty and success (he wrote a book about it *The Moral Basis of a Backward Society*).

● Arrow (1972) & Fukuyama (1995) found that the level of trust in a society strongly predicts its economic success.

● Guido Enrico Tabellini (an Italian economist) find that "there is not just one institutional failure. Typically, the countries or regions that fail in one dimension also fail in many other aspects of collective behavior."

● Inglehart (1990, 1997) analyses of a broader range of societies, and argue that cultural values fundamentally drive economic performance and democratic stability.

● Landes, D. S. (1998) & Rogers D. found that people's value shape their wealth (they wrote a book: *The wealth and poverty of nations: why some are so rich and some so poor*)

---

**References:** (you'll find many others in the references of their studies).

● Banfield, E. C. (1958). with the assistance of Laura Fasano Banfield. The moral basis of a backward society.

● Arrow, K. J. (1972). Economic welfare and the allocation of resources for invention. In Readings in industrial economics (pp. 219-236). Palgrave, London.

● Porta, R. L., Lopez-De-Silane, F., Shleifer, A., & Vishny, R. W. (1996). Trust in large organizations (No. w5864). National Bureau of Economic Research.

● Tabellini, G. (2008). Presidential Address: Institutions and Culture. Journal of the European Economic Association, 6(2/3), 255-294. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40282643

● Inglehart, R. (1997). Modernization and postmodernization: Cultural, economic, and political change in 43 societies. Princeton university press.

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Tags: social-psychology, experimental-psychology, reproducible-research
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# Question
Title: How to pursue a Psychology career in academia from non-Psychology background?
I don't have a Psychology degree but would like to pursue it. I'm interested in academic related work, teaching and research.

Is there any way I could make a career change without taking another Bachelor's degree?

# Answer
> 3 votes
Psychology is a very broad field. While some subfields require a license (e.g., clinical psychology), a huge number of undergraduate fields can prepare you for *academic related work, teaching and research*. I know individuals with Bachelors in Math, Physics, BME, EE, CS, MechE, Statistics, Neuroscience, Biology, Chemistry, Sociology, Speech and Hearing, Music, and Education who have either gone on to get a PhD in Psychology or a faculty position in a Psychology Department.

As a former faculty member in a Psychology department with an engineering background, I cannot think of any major I would turn away out of hand for a PhD position.

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Tags: psychology
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# Question
Title: Does associating a color with numbers improve math learning?
I have heard a number of reports that some mathematical savants associate particular colors with numbers. It got me wondering, if colors are associated with numbers during mathematical teaching, would this improve ability?

For example, if every time I showed my child the number 2, it was colored red, and every time I showed her 3, it was blue, and so on, would she learn arithmatical skills like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division faster?

Further, would it matter which colors were associated with which numbers? Should 5 be purple?

# Answer
> 11 votes
I don't know of research that answers this question directly, but I'm going to guess the answer is no, it wouldn't help, based on the following reasoning.

First, people tend to learn math less well when superfluous visual richness is added. I think adding color to numbers counts as superfluous visual richness.

> Brown, M. C., McNeil, N. M., & Glenberg, A. M. (2009). Using concreteness in education: Real problems, potential solutions. Child Development Perspectives, 3(3), 160–164.
>
> Mayer, R. E., Sims, V., & Tajika, H. (1995). A Comparison of How Textbooks Teach Mathematical Problem Solving in Japan and the United States. American Educational Research Journal, 32(2), 443–460.

Second, in general, associating something you want people to recall with a larger number of cues is going to help recall. (Sorry I don't know a citation for this off the top of my head, but I think it's a general principle of information theory.) In this case, the colors and the numerals are both cues for numbers, which should lead to better recall than if you only had the numerals. However, you are looking at learning arithmetic and not learning the number sequence.

Learning numbers MIGHT go faster with this additional cue. However, I'd be concerned whether there might be some negative impact on ability to use numerals once the color cue is removed, as it inevitably will be.

Presenting numbers together with analogue representations of magnitude does aid in learning arithmetic facts:

> Booth, J. L., & Siegler, R. S. (2008). Numerical magnitude representations influence arithmetic learning. Child Development, 79(4), 1016–1031.

However, analogue representations of magnitude are a cue that's relevant to the actual meaning of the numbers, while colors are not. I doubt colors would deliver this particular benefit.

With all that said, I haven't considered motivational issues. If children are motivated by brightly colored number blocks, then I'd say go ahead and use them. I doubt that the cognitive effects would be strong one way or the other, so even if negative, they'd probably be outweighed by any motivational benefits.

# Answer
> 7 votes
I would say it is highly unlikely.

The report that you reference is the savant Daniel Tammet who has performed many impressive mental feats, including holding the European record for most recited digits of pi. He has been popularized in the media in such documentaries as "Brain Man". He claims that he is able to accomplish such mathematical feats because of his synesthesia, which allows him to "see" different numbers as different shapes, sizes, and color. It is worth noting that his ability has also been greeted with skepticism both in pop culture (such as in the best seller Moonwalking with Einstein) and by synesthesia researchers who have studied him personally (Azoulai et al., 2005).

Tammet claims that he sees numbers as shapes, and that to multiply two numbers he sees the shapes "merge" in his head. It's not really clear how you could train someone to do this, if it is possible at all. It is possible that this is just an epiphenomenon, and does not actually help Tammet solve problems.

In fact, associating numbers with colors might actually *hurt* your performance. Mills et al. (2009) showed that a synesthete performed *slower* when the numbers in an addition problem were not congruent with her internal perception of them. Thus even if you were able to perform math problems faster, it may only apply when the numbers are congruent with the color-number pairing that you trained on. In the real world, you are most likely to see all numbers in only a single color.

> Azoulai, S., Hubbard, E., & Ramachandran, V. S. (2005). Does synesthesia contribute to mathematical savant skills. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 69. PDF
>
> Mills, C. B., Metzger, S. R., Foster, C. A., Valentine-Gresko, M. N., & Ricketts, S. (2009). Development of color-grapheme synesthesia and its effect on mathematical operations. Perception, 38(4), 591. PDF

# Answer
> 1 votes
Trying to calculate with a sequence of colours is not any easier than calculating with a sequence of digits.

There are alternative explanations for the high prevalence of synesthesia in mathematical savants.

For example:

1. Synesthesia is common in autism.
2. Synesthesia is associated with increases in white matter connectivity which might contribute to savant abilities.
3. Synesthesia is associated with more vivid mental imagery, which could be used to visualize the sequence of steps in a calculation.

Although there is an association between grapheme colour synesthesia and enhanced memory ability, this association is also present for stimuli which do not trigger synesthesia. Therefore we cannot conclude that associating digits with colours will increase the number of digits that can be manipulated in working memory.

On the other hand, some savants have more elaborate forms of synesthesia in which a two or three digit number has its own associations instead of being a combination of the associations for its constituent digits. In this case it is possible for the associations to directly benefit arithmetical ability by acting as a chunking strategy.

# Answer
> 0 votes
Some very good answers, and i note the important remark of @indolering

> I know that synesthesiacs perform worse in math, but I'm too lazy to look up the research. – Indolering Mar 11 '13 at 1:13

However, particularly if we generalize the question slightly to symbols rather than just numbers, it would be bold to assert that aside from motivational effects there is never any pedagogic benefit to be obtained from the use of colouring. We should not neglect the role played by selective attention in following an intricate symbolic argument. (training of visual selective attention is of especial importance in studying complex geometrical figures, and has to some extent been used, i think - but this is well beyond the scope of OP's question).

Also we should remember individual differences. Most trivially, if color were found to be of benefit in learning some mathematical idea or result, one would expect this benefit to be reduced for individuals with some degree of achromatopsia.

One should finally note that whilst the content of mathematics is objective, our conceptualizations depend quite strongly on the development of notation. Many typographical conventions are already in existence which certainly enhance learning of abstract concepts in mathematics.

The unfortunate truth of the matter is that to date the teaching of elementary maths is of a uniformly low quality, which there are reasons for, perhaps. Not least the domination of education theory by an arithmophobic intelligentsia to whom self-esteem is more important than the needs of both children and the society they grow up in.

Footnote

@caseyr5471 here included the following relevant quotation (italicized) from this paper

> The parietal area and prefrontal cortex from the neocortex are the source of ones ability to perform algebra and most other logic and analytic intensive tasks.
>
> *In a brain imaging study of children learning algebra, it is shown that the same regions are active in children solving equations as are active in experienced adults solving equations. As with adults, practice in symbol manipulation produces a reduced activation in prefrontal cortex area. However, unlike adults, practice seems also to produce a decrease in a parietal area that is holding an image of the equation. This finding suggests that adolescents' brain responses are more plastic and change more with practice. These results are integrated in a cognitive model that predicts both the behavioral and brain imaging results.*

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Tags: learning, mathematical-ability
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title: Stability of Personality and Formation

text:
# Question
Title: Stability of Personality and Formation
As an economist I'm interested in what shapes personality and Indeed whether or not personality/traits change over time. For example, does personality change when placed in a high pressure environment, let's say a demanding job. Or does a demanding job attract those with a certain personality. I would have thought it would be a combination of the two. I presume significant life events would shape personality to some degree. Furthermore, is personality something that's formed in childhood or is it more biological. Is our personality always evolving? I apologize if this seems trivial! Economists are not renowned for their knowledge of Psychology.

# Answer
> 2 votes
Actually some if not all of your question can be answered fairly succinctly by quoting from a fairly recent meta analysis cited in the Wikipedia page on the topic:

> The longitudinal stability of personality is low in childhood but increases substantially into adulthood. Theoretical explanations for this trend differ in the emphasis placed on intrinsic maturation and socializing influences. To what extent does the increasing stability of personality result from the continuity and crystallization of genetically influenced individual differences, and to what extent does the increasing stability of life experiences explain increases in personality trait stability? Behavioral genetic studies, which decompose longitudinal stability into sources associated with genetic and environmental variation, can help to address this question. We aggregated effect sizes from 24 longitudinal behavioral genetic studies containing information on a total of 21,057 sibling pairs from 6 types that varied in terms of genetic relatedness and ranged in age from infancy to old age. A combination of linear and nonlinear meta-analytic regression models were used to evaluate age trends in levels of heritability and environmentality, stabilities of genetic and environmental effects, and the contributions of genetic and environmental effects to overall phenotypic stability. **Both the genetic and environmental influences on personality increase in stability with age. The contribution of genetic effects to phenotypic stability is moderate in magnitude and relatively constant with age, in part because of small-to-moderate decreases in the heritability of personality over child development that offset increases in genetic stability. In contrast, the contribution of environmental effects to phenotypic stability increases from near zero in early childhood to moderate in adulthood. The life-span trend of increasing phenotypic stability, therefore, predominantly results from environmental mechanisms.**

(emphasis mine) And since the abstract is somewhat devoid of figures... later in the article the contributions are quantified:

> Heritability tends to be high and accounts for the large majority of variance in infancy. Heritability declines substantially in early childhood and somewhat more slowly thereafter, resulting in roughly 40% of variance in personality attributable to genetic influences throughout adulthood. Environmentality displays the opposite pattern. Corrected for measurement error, environmentality shows a similar upward trajectory with a peak of accounting for over 40% of variance in personality. \[...\] By midlife, genetic and environmental effects were found to contribute almost equally to phenotypic stability.

That half-and-half figure may be somewhat easy to misinterpret though. That's because environment doesn't necessarily mean present environment, i.e. someone's personality may be substantially affected by past events that are not easy to "undo" (counter-effect). More recent research has put the combined figure of stable influences affecting personality (e.g. genes, past environment, considered as a whole) to 83%. That sounds fairly consistent with voluntary attempts at changing one's personality having relatively small effect.

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Tags: personality
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# Question
Title: Is there a proper name of learning by experience (i.e. feeling something subconsciously)?
We all know about these two ways of learning:

1. Rote learning (by mechanically repeating something to remember it).
2. Learning by understanding (by understanding the logic behind something).

But I strongly believe, that one more way of learning exists - learning **by feeling**. But do we have a term or some explanation for this type of learning?

Some examples:

1. you can learn the formula for least-count of device by:
    * repeating it to remember it whenever required;
    * understanding it to derive it whenever required;
    * by feeling it, i.e. using the device for some time, to enable us to put that formula in our subconscious mind;
2. *(better example)* in chemistry, we can learn the effect of $NO\_2$ on benzene, the following ways:
    * repeating it;
    * understanding its chemical nature, its structure and then concluding the results;
    * by seeing examples of its reactions and feeling that that is its behavior, to happen like this.

# Answer
Maybe what you are looking for is tacit knowledge:

> Tacit knowledge is the kind of knowledge that is difficult to transfer to another person by means of writing it down or verbalizing it. For example, that London is in the United Kingdom is a piece of explicit knowledge that can be written down, transmitted, and understood by a recipient. However, the ability to speak a language, ride a bicycle, knead dough, play a musical instrument, or design and use complex equipment requires all sorts of knowledge that is not always known explicitly, even by expert practitioners, and which is difficult or impossible to explicitly transfer to other people.

> With tacit knowledge, people are not often aware of the knowledge they possess or how it can be valuable to others. Effective transfer of tacit knowledge generally requires extensive personal contact, regular interaction and trust. This kind of knowledge can only be revealed through practice in a particular context and transmitted through social networks. To some extent it is "captured" when the knowledge holder joins a network or a community of practice.

Another word that may suit your description is intuition:

> Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without proof, evidence, or conscious reasoning, or without understanding how the knowledge was acquired. Different writers give the word "intuition" a great variety of different meanings, ranging from direct access to unconscious knowledge, unconscious cognition, inner sensing, inner insight to unconscious pattern-recognition and the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning.

> Instinct is often misinterpreted as intuition and its reliability considered to be dependent on past knowledge and occurrences in a specific area. For example, someone who has had more experiences with children will tend to have a better instinct about what they should do in certain situations with them. This is not to say that one with a great amount of experience is always going to have an accurate intuition.
> 4 votes

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Tags: learning
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# Question
Title: Uncsoncious expectation of other people to be motivated by the same values as you
Is there a special term describing the situation when somebody automatically expects other people's behaviour to be motivated by the same values that motivate his own?

For instance, out of my personal observations, dishonest people expect other people to be dishonest, as well. Dishonest people would never truly believe the behaviour of honest and loyal people around them. Much in the same manner, they would never truly abhor being cheated - to them that is something natural and while unpleasant, it is not necessarily evil - just like you would dislike bad weather, but you would not attribute the quality of evil to it.

# Answer
> 2 votes
I think two close concepts are that of "naïve realism" and the false consensus effect.

The basic idea of naive realism is very simple. You believe your beliefs to be true! That seems a bit silly, but we can create a concrete example. Let's say you think President Trump is a great president. You have some reasons for believing it, and you have faith in your own cognitive abilities to judge evidence and come to logical conclusions. Therefore, if someone disagrees with your they must either have bad information or have different values (i.e. be bad people since most of us think of ourselves as good people).

The false consensus affect seems a bit closer to what you describe. That people (in this case, you) "overestimate the extent to which their opinions, beliefs, preferences, values, and habits are normal and typical of those of others (i.e., that others also think the same way that they do)"

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Tags: social-psychology, motivation, behavior, projection
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# Question
Title: conservative vs liberal: not related to rate of yes vs no
I am not a psychology major, so forgive me if I'm misusing terms.

So on an exam, we had a question about signal detection, and it defined a conservative person as someone who **always** tend to reply negatively ("no"-s), rather than agree ("yes"-s).

I believe that this isn't correct. Consider the TSA for example, they are extremely liberal in the sense that they would screen you even when they have minimal suspicions about you. However, the percentage of people they screen is still very low, because the probability of the signal itself is very low.

Do you know any source in literature that could point out why that is wrong? Or maybe could you come up with a counter-argument that would make sense.

# Answer
As I said in this answer, for these types of questions I really like *Detection Theory: A User's Guide* by Macmillan and Creelman. They consider 3 types of bias ($c$, $c'$, and $\beta$) that differ in how they behave when the index of sensitivity $d'$ changes, but all three of their definitions agree with your professor that a conservative observer always replies *no* more often than *yes*, regardless of the probability of a *signal* being present. All three definitions also lead to the conclusion that the *ideal* (maximum likelihood) observer is biased when the probability of a *signal* being present is not equal to 0.5 (with the standard Gaussian distributions with equal variance assumptions). While it may be uncomfortable to you that the *ideal* observer is *biased*, this happens all the time in estimation. That said, Macmillan and Creelman defined three different biases, there is no reason we cannot define a fourth that behaves as you want it to ...

I suggest starting with Macmillan and Creelman's definition of $\beta$. They define $\beta$ to be equal to $p(x|S\_2)/p(x|S\_1)$ where $p(x|S\_1)$ is the probability of observing $x$ given stimulus $S\_1$. Within their framework, an unbiased observer has a $\beta$ of one. If we define $\beta'$ to be $p(S\_2|x)/p(S\_1|x)$ and an unbiased observer as having a $\beta'$ equal to 1, then the ideal observer is unbiased. That seems like a nice result. In the case where $p(S\_1)$ is equal to $p(S\_2)$, $\beta$ is equal to $\beta'$, so that is good too. When $p(S\_1)$ is less than $p(S\_2)$ a conservative observer could say *yes* more than *no*, which I don't like, but that is the case when we force the ideal observer to be unbiased.
> 2 votes

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Tags: bias, signal-detection
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# Question
Title: Term for "That feeling that in a game you don't get items that you really need"
I've heard people in games mention that the game is programmed so that when you really need an item the game will not give it to you. You only get items that you don't currently need.

I think this is BS and it's peoples minds playing tricks on them. What is the term for this kind of trick playing your brain does? It must be related to the awareness you have of a particular item when you need it and the anxiety associated with the situation every time you don't get it.

# Answer
> 2 votes
Sounds like an example of the availability heuristic.

> Availability heuristic: The process whereby judgments of frequency or probability are based on how readily pertinent instances come to mind.

You're more likely to notice when you don't get your way, which makes that event stand out to you. That combined with how people tend to not notice how frequently things **do** go our way because there isn't a negative emotion associated with that experience (I would assume) could make it seem like the game is rigged. Then again, I don't know anything about video game design so it could be part of how it is programmed.

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Tags: perception, terminology
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# Question
Title: How can different ion channels of the same type have different cell responses?
The NMDA receptor is an ion channel and contributes to synaptic plasticity and memory. It is said that calcium ion flux through the receptor is critical for this mechanism. However, there are other ion channels that let calcium ions into the cell, how come they don't contribute to synaptic plasticity (to my knowledge)?

# Answer
> 4 votes
Quibbling about other types of LTP (not mediated by NDMA receptors) aside, this is a good question, with a rather intricate answer.

Basically (NDMAR mediated) LTP is not merely activated by calcium, but rather by CaMKII, which essentially acts a sort longer-term chemical memory for calcium that was once "detected" in a spine. A couple of points quoted from a fairly recent review paper:

> * \[a\] bulk calcium signal, when produced by depolarization of voltage-dependent calcium channels, is not sufficient to activate CaMKII.
> * a calcium signal will stay largely within the activated spine. The next step in the long-term potentiation cascade is the binding of calcium to the four binding sites on calmodulin. Calcium-saturated calmodulin keeps calcium bound for ~1 ms, a long enough time for calmodulin to diffuse within the spine and to bind CaMKII, but too short a period of time to diffuse out of the spine. \[...\] CaMKII diffuses at a very slow rate (for CaMKII to exit spines may take many minutes), activated CaMKII is mostly localized to the activated spine.

So basically a fast signal (calcium) gets converted into a (spatially) slow but locally persistent CaMKII signal (via calmodulin). As I understand it, anyway.

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Tags: neuroscience, memory
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title: IQ Test stability longitudinal study

text:
# Question
Title: IQ Test stability longitudinal study
I am wondering if someone could direct me to a longitudinal study examining IQ test scores over time. For example, testing a group of test subjects every 10 years from age 5 to age 65.

The reason I am looking for such a study is I am interested to know what proof there is or is not that IQ is stable over time. It seems to me that it is accepted that IQ should be stable over a lifetime, but I haven't found any study that demonstrates this.

If we assume that IQ is the result of genetics and early childhood environment, then it follows that it should be stable over a lifespan, but I am looking for a study that demonstrates this through repeated IQ measurement over the lifespan.

I'll just give a bit of background about what I understand about IQ below:

* IQ is obviously not an exact measure. It's reasonable that a person's measured IQ could vary by around +/- 6 IQ points from their true IQ, therefore it is still a stable measurements if all IQ measurements over a lifespan are within a 12 point range.
* Brain damage such as catastrophic injury or regular alcohol abuse can permanently lower IQ.
* During adolescence there has been shown to be greater than normal fluctuation in IQ. I would suppose that, because IQ is a measure against age peers, the wide differences in maturation for individuals in the adolescent age range account for the fluctuations in IQ. However I would be interested to know if there were studies that showed children's IQs to have permanently raised or lowered during adolesence.
* If an individual has difficulty with an IQ test not related to raw intellegence, for example, if they have ADHD and therefore difficulty concentrating, then treating their issue may allow them to score higher on an IQ test than prior to treatment. In these cases it would seem that the condition masked their intelligence, and treatment did not improve their intelligence but allowed it to be measured more accurately. The same could probably be said of an individual for whom cultural biases in an IQ test (eg with verbal knowledge) worked against them.

# Answer
There are some subtleties to this question which you may or may not realize. There are (at least) two similarly sounding questions, but they are actually quite different questions:

* Does an individual's general cognitive abilities change throughout life?
* Does the rank-order of a population's cognitive abilities change throughout life? In other words, if we test a population at one time and then again at another time, will those who scored highly on the first test also be the ones who score highly on the second test and vice versa?

The answer to the first is trivially yes. An individual's brain is more powerful and has learned more when they are 22, then when they are 4, say. There is also reduction in cognitive abilities when people become elderly.

The second question is more interesting. For this I would refer first to the paper:

Deary et al (2000). The stability of individual differences in mental ability from childhood to old age: Follow-up of the 1932 Scottish Mental Survey. See pdf here.

They conclude that

> **The correlation between Moray House Test scores at age 11 and age 77 was 0.63, which adjusted to 0.73** when corrected for attenuation of ability range within the re-tested sample. This, the longest follow-up study of psychometric intelligence reported to date, shows that mental ability differences show substantial stability from childhood to late life.

So the rank-order of abilities within a population probably correlates \>0.7 with its rank-order six and a half decades later (age 11 to age 77).

Another interesting study, which is new and I don't believe is published yet, is the following:

Grønkjær et al. Associations between education and age-related cognitive changes in a 41-year follow-up study

In this Danish longitudinal study, they have them first tested at mean age 20, then again 41 years later at mean age 61. They report finding:

> The mean change in BPP test scores was -2.94 (SD 5.60) and a **retest correlation of 0.81** between the baseline and follow-up BPP scores was observed.

These correlations are not quite in the 0.9-1.0 range, and hence we're certainly not seeing perfect stability. On the other hand, I don't think I know any quantitatively measured psychological trait which shows a greater longitudinal stability (in terms of rank-ordering) than general cognitive ability.
> 3 votes

# Answer
Eff basically has a good answer, but more recent studies, such as one published in Nature 2011 have some additional data with respect to the observed variation over time not being just random measurement error but partially explainable through changes in the volume of some brain areas:

> In the absence of neurological insult or degenerative conditions, IQ is usually expected to be stable across lifespan, as evidenced by the fact that IQ measurements taken at different points in an individual’s life tend to correlate well. Nevertheless, strong correlations over time disguise considerable individual variation: for example a correlation coefficient of .7 (which is not unusual with verbal IQ) still leaves over 50% of the variation unexplained. \[...\]
>
> The changes in brain structure that correlated with changes in IQ allow us to explain some of the variance in terms of brain development. Specifically, 66% of the variance in Time 2 V\[erbal\]IQ was accounted for by Time 1 VIQ, a further 20% was accounted for by the change in grey matter density in the left motor speech region, with the remaining 14% unaccounted for. Similarly, 35% of the variance in Time 2 P\[erformance\]IQ was accounted for by Time 1 PIQ, with 13% accounted for by the change in grey matter density in the anterior cerebellum, leaving 52% unaccounted for. \[...\]
>
> Further studies are required to determine the generalisability of this finding: for example, is the same degree of plasticity present throughout life or are the adolescent years covered by this study special in this regard.

What I find interesting about this study is that they were able to explain a lot more of the change in verbal IQ than performance (and thus full scale) IQ.

And if you're looking at the stability of IQ raw scores (as opposed to rank order), early adulthood is when this happens \[with respect to rest of life\], so age of 5 is way to soon.

This is based on a meta-analysis, so larger circles show greater data weight & precision.
> 2 votes

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Tags: iq, neuropsychology
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title: Cerebellum question

text:
# Question
Title: Cerebellum question
Sorry if this sounds at all like pretentious armchair theorizing(it basically is), but I have a question which I can't really figure out how to search. So, given the resemblance of the cerebellum to the brain as a whole, is it possible that the growth of the brain beyond the cerebellum arose from a mutation forcing the growth of a second, "extra" cerebellum? Again, feel free to downvote this into oblivion if it's either obvious or stupid. Sorry again.

# Answer
> 5 votes
I don't have a clear and definitive answer to give to you but first you should have a look about brain development (from:https://www.apa.org/education/k12/brain-function):

And to the function associated to cerebellum:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4346664/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5243918/

And the number of neurons:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2776484/

And maybe have a look about difference between species :

http://www.suzanaherculanohouzel.com/comparative-neuroanatomy/

It appear that cerebellum have specific function interacting with the rest of the brain. It present size variations between species from different branch of evolution....

# Answer
> 5 votes
Hagfish, the most primitive vertebrates, do not appear to have a cerebellum, or if they do have one it is very primitive. Hagfish have most of the other structures found in vertebrate brains (including the telencephalon), so it is likely that the cerebellum actually evolved after the other five main brain regions.

It is possible that the dorsal cochlear nucleus, a region on the dorso-lateral surface of the mammalian brainstem, started out as an 'extra cerebellum'. Some fish and amphibians also have 'cerebellum like structures', such as the dorsal octavolateral nucleus. However, the cerebrum almost certainly did not evolve from the cerebellum.

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Tags: neuroscience, theoretical-neuroscience, brain, evolution
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# Question
Title: How to test whether THC or CBD gives a mental boost?
Studies have shown significant reduction in seizures in babies to adults when taking marijuana. I would call that amazing but what does it do in improving cognitive abilities in normal people?

Anecdotal reports across the internet claim that marijuana consumption can aid in creative thinking. Why is that? Is it the Cannabidiol (CBD) a phytocannabinoid (bought over the counter where I live) or the Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) a cannabinoid (which is still a misdemeanor) that contributes to creativity?

**How can I do a controlled experiment or test to determine which chemical is giving me a mental advantage in creative thinking?**

# Answer
The only study I'm aware of is the following:

> Cannabis increased verbal fluency in low creatives to the same level as that of high creatives. Cannabis increased state psychosis-like symptoms in both groups and the high creativity group were significantly higher in trait schizotypy, but this does not appear to be linked to the verbal fluency change. Acute cannabis use increases divergent thinking as indexed by verbal fluency in low creatives.

Regarding whether THC or CBD causes an increase in creativity the authors note that:

> A few studies have attempted to objectively investigate whether cannabis increases creativity. Cannabis users produced more original (i.e. statistically infrequent) responses on an associative ability test when intoxicated with the drug compared to users given placebo (Block, Farinpour, & Braverman, 1992). Similarly, verbal fluency was significantly and dose-dependently improved by THC (the active ingredient in cannabis) compared with placebo in healthy volunteers given all treatments (Curran, Brignell, Fletcher, Middleton, & Henry, 2002). In contrast, Tinklenberg, Darley, Roth, Pferbhaum, and Koppel (1978) found that cannabis did not enhance scores in uniqueness, fluency, flexibility or elaboration during an object description task, considered to be a measure of creativity.

Schafer et al. 2012: Investigating the interaction between schizotypy, divergent thinking and cannabis use
> 4 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, psychopharmacology, psychophysics, medication
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# Question
Title: Link between reading news and deteriorating mental health?
Given the prevalence of negativity and sensationalism in the news, I suspect individuals are also varyingly susceptible to (worsening) mental health issues arising from prolonged exposure. Perhaps as reports of distant events accumulate as an overall negative impression of the person's environment.

> Research clearly shows that both nature and nurture play important roles in the genesis of psychopathology. (Tsuang, et al. 2004).

Have there been any studies at all investigating the significance of news as part of that environment as a cause of mental disorders?

## References

Tsuang, M. T., Bar, J. L., Stone, W. S., & Faraone, S. V. (2004). Gene-environment interactions in mental disorders. World Psychiatry, 3(2), 73. pmcid: 1414673

# Answer
There was a talk on this topic at the 2019 Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) conference. I haven't been able to find a published paper based on the study they presented, but the authors generally concluded that political engagement can be associated with significant mental, emotional, and social health costs.

> **Reference**
>
> Smith, Kevin; Hibbing, John; Hibbing, Matthew (2019). Friends, Relatives, Sanity and Health: The Psychological Costs of Politics. Presented at the annual conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP). Portland, OR.
>
> **Description**
>
> Using a nationally representative sample this study investigates the impact of political engagement on the psychological health of the American electorate. Results suggest that among large numbers of Americans politics is linked to stress, depression, various compulsive behaviors and even thoughts of suicide.
> 1 votes

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Tags: environmental-psychology
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# Question
Title: Are there contemporary buildings that have been designed based on colour psychology?
I am writing my thesis on how environmental psychology has influenced architecture and i am focusing on colour. I am looking for buildings that have been designed based on how colour affects the human psychology and physiology.

# Answer
Restaurants such as Mc Donalds and In N Out use the red/ yellow color scheme as it is proven to induce hunger. Subway stations were fitted with blue lights in an effort to reduce suicides occurring within them and for reasons still undecided- it worked. I learned this from my ap psychology class recently.
> 0 votes

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Tags: color, environmental-psychology
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# Question
Title: What are the methodological differences between a ‘constructed’ and a ‘standardized’ psychological test?
What are the methodological differences between a ‘constructed’ and a ‘standardized’ psychological test?

This was a question asked in the exam. Kindly help me understand the key differences.

# Answer
> 0 votes
A standardized test is one that is given in a consistent manner and yields the same, valid, results each time. Students are administered the test in the same environment and given the same amount of time. A constructed test would then be the opposite; takers are given different amounts of time, administered the test in different environments and evaluated differently.

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Tags: measurement
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# Question
Title: How can psychologists define 'mental health' when we know quite little about complexities of human life?
Erich Fromm in his *The Sane Society* (1955) argued that mental health should not be defined merely in terms of the person's harmony with his/her society. He believed that a society, as a whole, could be mentally ill. He said that all humans share a common human nature, with which some cultures are not in accordance.

Maybe that's the cause of the collapse of some civilizations in the past.

One big problem here is the complexity of human brain and human life which make predictions difficult. For example, in the 60s and the 70s a sexual revolution occurred in western countries. Psychologists today consider some sexual behaviors normal/healthy which were traditionally discouraged. But in comparison with the age of human civilization on earth, these changes in norms are very recent experiments, about the results of which we may not be able to be sure.

We can see the same problem in economics, which is, in some sense, based on psychology. As an example, since the 80s neoliberalism has been the predominant economic theory in western countries, but now some big names in economics state that it is a failed experiment, causing many problems like deep inequality and the rise of populism.

# Answer
Although you are correct in thinking, mental health is not defined merely by what others feel, it is a lot more personal. If I am understanding your question correctly, you believe that mental health is based on predictions. While predictions are necessary for defining a lesser known disorder, ones such as major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder are quite common and have been so for long enough that diagnosing them is relatively easy. In addition, it can be widely agreed upon that behavior such as suicide and self-harm are abnormal. A persistent change in mood is another indicator of a cognitive error. Lastly, hallucinations and delusions are also clearly indicative of an underlying problem. All of these symptoms must be present without the use of drugs, obviously. Any other behavior or thought pattern that interferes with daily life and/or is societally unacceptable should be a reason for alarm. These symptoms are clear and require no similar cases to diagnose an "issue with mental health" Aside from common, well-known disorders, evidence of other cases must be present in order to label such as a specific disorder. What I cannot prove are the disorders that are few and far between, and seem highly implausible. Regardless, if one seems "different" for an extended period of time and does not seem to be improving, it would be wise to seek help. Hope this makes sense, it was a fun question to answer;)
> 1 votes

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Tags: sociology, norms, definition
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# Question
Title: I have developed a self-regulation system that allows change at the physiological level. Does it have any merit?
**Please note:** I do not hold a degree. This system is based on experience and self-testing.

I developed a self-regulation system that allows for the manipulation of sensations where they occur in the body. I'd love to get my idea out into the public, but was cautioned against potential liability. As such I am wondering whether this system has any scientific merit. Secondly, if the idea has merit, where do I start?

# Overview

This system has two main applications: the immediate self-regulation of emotions, and the self-regulation of other bodily sensations, such as pain and other discomforts.

## Emotions

We start with the assumption that the brain monitors the body for physiological changes (emotion), and then maps those changes to a specific emotion-related feeling, as noted by neurologist Antonio Damasio in this Scientific American article.

If we can call a specific set of physiological changes that form an emotion an emotional ‘profile’, then the system is used to interrupt one or more physiological features of the profile. This causes the profile to collapse and the emotion-related feeling to dissipate with immediate effect. It is achieved using techniques (e.g. a body-internal micro action) inherent to the system.

In my experience this system does not rely on reasoning or any form of rationale, nor breathing techniques or meditation. It is non-intrusive and less susceptible to self-sabotage since the techniques are largely functional / mechanical in nature.

A further benefit of this system is that it allows for the generation of a general sense of positivity as well as specific positive emotions without requiring any specific internal or external stimuli.

**Applications** I’ve used this system for the past five years to self-regulate emotions. These include run of the mill emotions, such as anger, despondency, sadness, and fear. It has also been used to successfully alleviate / eliminate the physiological features of stress, depression and anxiety. In all instances results are instantaneous.

## Health

One accidental discovery associated with this system is its health applications. One aspect of the system is a functional or ‘mechanised’ positivity that can be applied anywhere in the body. When applied to pain or other bodily discomforts, the discomforts tend to lessen in intensity, or immediately vanish. I suspect that it also actively promotes the body’s natural healing ability where it is applied.

**Applications**

I have successfully used this system to address the following:

* Random aches and pains
* Inflammation
* Wounds
* Flu symptoms
* Suspected nerve damage (Morton’s neuroma / metatarsalgia)
* Rotator cuff damage
* Pulled muscles
* Stomach ailments

It should be noted that results in this instance range from immediate to the morning following application. Multiple applications are required with the more serious anomalies, however with marked improvement following each application.

I have also tested this system by allowing an anomaly to progress without any interference – specifically, instances of suspected nerve damage and inflammation. In most cases the discomfort only increased. A sudden application of the functional positivity resulted in alleviated discomfort and a U-turn towards healing.

# Answer
I'm not going to answer the question I think you want answered: whether your system has merit. Instead, I'm going to answer a related question that I think you actually need answered: How do you determine if a therapeutic approach is effective?

**Ultimately, this sort of question can only be answered with a clinical trial**. In a clinical trial, your approach will be tested against other approaches or placebo approaches to look for differences in outcomes. In order to do a clinical trial, you need to get the permission of an appropriate regulatory body in order to enroll subjects and continue. **Doing anything else is unethical.**

In order to get this permission, you need some credibility in the field. For this sort of project, that would probably start with either having some sort of degree or certification as a clinical psychologist or therapist, or recruiting people with those credentials to help you with your study. *If you don't think your idea is worth this effort, your idea is not worthwhile.*

On the way to getting this education, you will learn about existing strategies that are used, which will help you to refine and consider your own terminology. Maybe you think you've invented something new but find that it already exists under a term you didn't know. Maybe you find someone else has already studied something similar and found no effect. Maybe you find that your idea is really a novel improvement to something already used in practice. Learning these things will help you to frame your idea. *If you don't think your idea is worth this effort, your idea is not worthwhile.*

If you want to go in more depth along this way of thinking, the next step would be a research degree, most likely a PhD. The training for a PhD will teach you how to approach these ideas scientifically, to look through the literature, and just generally to go deeper into a topic than you would in a clinical position.

Note that there are many many many people that go down this path and put a lot of effort into their work: there aren't really any easy answers left. It's a lot of work to find positive results. You probably won't start researching your own ideas, but rather expanding incrementally on the work of others. At that point, you will have enough credibility and background knowledge to test new hypotheses. You might find that your original thinking makes no sense. You might find new motivations by reading about other peoples' work (and 'standing on the shoulders of giants'). *If you don't think your idea is worth this effort, your idea is not worthwhile.*
> 4 votes

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Tags: emotion, sensation
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# Question
Title: Is there an evolutionary psychology explanation why children have high pitched voices?
I have come across purely mechanical reasons that explain why children have piping/high pitched voices - length of trachea etc. However, I find myself wondering whether there isn't a deeper evolutionary reason why the mechanics evolved that way. Is there a Kinderschema type explanation for this? I have attempted to find information on the subject and turned up nothing - perhaps because I am simply not searching for the right thing.

# Answer
> 1 votes
Children have high pitched voices relative to adults because their vocal folds are shorter and physics demands that short vocal folds result in higher pitches. The format frequencies of children are also higher than adults due to shorter vocal tract lengths.

I think your question is, is there a speech communication reason for the vocal folds and vocal tract of children to be shorter than adults to which I would argue that it is unlikely. While it is possible to be grown with adult sized features (e.g., the inner ear and the middle ear ossicles), generally babies are smaller than adults. There would need to be a strong evolutionary advantage to being born with a really long vocal tract. Second, from what I can piece together, (e.g., this article) a shorter vocal tract is desirable for suckling. Therefore I would conclude that evolutionary speaking babies have shorter vocal tracts because they are smaller than adults and if the vocal tract was longer it would make it harder to feed.

# Answer
> -2 votes
High pitch sound is a shortwave vibration which travels longer distances than the low pitch sound. It also requires less energy to be produced. So it makes sense that children are able to scream long and loud enough to ask for help.

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Tags: evolutionary-psychology
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# Question
Title: How to measure the correlation between "spirituality" and the susceptibility to false memories?
Is there a measurement to correlate "spirituality" (how religious one is) to susceptibility to false memories? What papers or keywords should we look for?

# Answer
Maybe what you are looking for is the field cognitive science of religion:

> Cognitive science of religion is the study of religious thought and behavior from the perspective of the cognitive and evolutionary sciences. The field employs methods and theories from a very broad range of disciplines, including: cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive anthropology, artificial intelligence, neurotheology, developmental psychology, and archaeology. Scholars in this field seek to explain how human minds acquire, generate, and transmit religious thoughts, practices, and schemas by means of ordinary cognitive capacities.

Follow up resources:
> 6 votes

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Tags: memory, reference-request, terminology, religion
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# Question
Title: Is there any credible evidence for the theory of Spiral Dynamics?
Spiral dynamics is a developmental psychology based theory that postulates these main ideas:

* Organisms in the universe go through a predictable set of stages of psychological development.
* These stages each exhibit a set of values that the organism tries to obtain.
* Their pursuit for these values are clearly observable, i.e. it is possible to identify that the organism is trying to obtain these values.

This image illustrates the different stages postulated by the theory, the characteristics of organism's behavior that are within each level, and also their overall world view.

Here is a table (Dr. Clare Grave's model) that breaks down these characteristics into categories:

I have heard that this theory is credible and that there is evidence for it, though I have struggled to find any.

Is there any evidence that strongly suggests all living organisms/creatures/life forms, in terms of mentality, consistently travel through a set of stages, where their values (and overall objectives) are respectively: gaining assurance, obtaining survival, obtaining security, obtaining independence, and then obtaining affiliation.

While Dr. Graves himself did studies to produce this theory, his methods have been criticized heavily. At this point of time, are there any other studies that suggest that the postulate mentioned is consistent with various empirical observations?

# Answer
> 1 votes
Dr Graves' research relates to human developmental psychology, not 'all living things'. In his book Integral Psychology (2000) Ken Wilber cross references multiple bodies of work, including eastern philosophy and western psychology. Wilber mentions a number of other researchers whose work correlates with Graves' findings, including Paiget, Fowler, Kegan, Cook-Greuter to name a few.

Three key findings from Graves' work are: 1. The responsive nature of human consciousness to the complexity of life conditions. 2. The trajectory of and the human experience of change between the stages. 3. The open-ended, staged developmental sequence with alternating themes of self-expression and self-sacrifice.

You can find my interpretation of Graves' model at my website https://www.eman8.net

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, social-psychology, developmental-psychology
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# Question
Title: Correct term for realistic user behaviour and decision making
Describing the limitations of my study surrounding the modeling of domestic hot water storage tanks, I want to find a precise term to describe realistic user behavior, which was disregarded in my simulation.

Such behavior would include, e.g.,

* interrupting/postponing the draw-off during bathing once the temperature falls below a certain limit
* increasing the temperature setting preceding unusually high hot water consumption

Could I refer to this behavior as "game-theoretical effects", or is there another, more fitting, scientific term?

# Answer
Science in general refers to ecological validity as the degree to which materials and settings in a study approximate the real world that is being examined.

Therefore, such limitations could be referred to as limitations to ecological validity. Often, such limitations are inherent to running an experimental study, as opposed to studying the real world. Whether or not this is a risk to the overall validity of your study depends on what conclusions you intend to draw from the results.
> 2 votes

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Tags: decision-making, game-theory
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# Question
Title: What time range between 2 measures for test-retest reliability?
How much time between 2 measurements is needed (at least / at most) to be called test-retest reliability?

Concrete casus: I am planning a meta-analysis on reliability of various loneliness scales. We want to determine beforehand what time frame between measures we will consider.

For instance, if the time between 2 measures is 2 years (such as in some longitudinal papers), we would consider this to be an indication of rank-order stability rather than test-retest reliability. This is a clear case, but what about 3 months? Or 1 month? Where should be the limit?

We are looking for good resources to base our decision on, and would be glad with any advise.

# Answer
> 1 votes
Although I don't know the answer, I think it would be important to explain what you exactly wish to do with the re-test? If you solely wish to know how reliable the score is, you could do the test on day 1 and the re-test on day 2? The longer the time, the higher the chance that a person's life is subject to change (*e.g.*, the loss of relatives, or medical intervention), and that it's not a re-test *per se*, but a different time point in a person's life. Regardless, I think it would be good to have a look at some of the best-cited papers in your arena of research and see what they do, and perhaps contact the authors of why they choose 2 years.

If it is for a review meta analysis paper, as you say in your comments, then the answer to your question is all about your research question. If indeed you wish to minimize that intervening time (t), the best thing might be to map all the papers, organize them in ascending order of t and then decide what the minimum #papers is you wish to include in your review. A kind of reversed approach, but if the #papers is the bottle neck, it may in fact be a proper, and maybe even the only way to go.

P.S. -- for what it's worth -- I don't like to write unreferenced answers, but in this case it seems warranted and in fact I was urged by a long-time user to convert my comments into an answer

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Tags: measurement, reference-request, methodology, reliability
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# Question
Title: Do .sav files expire after the trial version expires?
I saved a certain file on an SPSS software that expires after 2 weeks of its installation. I wanted to ask if my file would still exist even after the expiration date. The data is for psychology research.

# Answer
> 3 votes
The only difference between **trial software** and the 'real' thing is that trial software looses some or all functions after the trial period. Any files generated with it will be kept and be functional; only the exe file is affected. The company of course hopes that you wish to use those files after the trial period and buy the full license.

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Tags: statistics
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# Question
Title: How many synapses in the average human brain?
Knowing there are **100,000,000,000** neurons in an average human brain, and **7,000** dendrites in each neuron, and neurons are connected to each other by dendrites and axon terminals, how many synapses are there in an average human brain? (I don't know how many axon terminals per neuron there are on average.)

# Answer
The human neocortex contains approximately 1.5x10^14 synapses, connecting its 19–23 billion neurons.

Source: Pakkenberg, B., Pelvig, D., Marner, L., Bundgaard, M. J., Gundersen, H. J. G., Nyengaard, J. R., & Regeur, L. (2003). Aging and the human neocortex. Experimental Gerontology, 38(1-2), 95-99. doi:10.1016/S0531-5565(02)00151-1
> 5 votes

# Answer
The neocortex is just sight and hearing. You really need to include the entire nervous system's number of nerves to truly appreciate the processing power of the human neural network. How many nerves are in the human body? Even an estimate of 10^11 (100 billion) neurons times an average of 7000 dendrites or 7.0 * 10^4 connections is 7.0 * 10^15 (7,000,000,000,000,000) or 7 quintillion neural connections. Each neuron operates once every 10 ms or 100 times per second, or 700 * 10^15 or 700 quintillion operations per second.

Furthermore, the chemical connection between neurons are effectively "analog", or floating-point, so the correct term isn't "bits per second" but FLOPS. Collectively, my estimate above based on common google searches is 700 exaFLOP per second. For comparison, new the supercomputer being installed at Argonne Labs operates at 1 exaFLOPS and comes with no software.
> -1 votes

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Tags: neuroscience, neuroanatomy
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# Question
Title: What is it called to attack a person then say something uplifting?
Say a manager emailing the people under her in a way that to them feels degrading, and putting down. But at the end of the email its encouraging/uplifting type saying I know you are intelligent and capable people.

So is there a name of this type of behavior to attack/degrade then at the end say something nice?

# Answer
It sounds like a variant on the **sandwich technique**, which is advocated by some as the preferred way to deliver critical feedback to a person, like a student or employee. The sandwich technique can be defined as:

> ...offer\[ing\] a piece of negative feedback “sandwiched" between two positive ones, thus easing the blow of the critique.

Note that this technique is criticized, because people might not remember the crucial middle critical part of the message, because of the **recency effect**: our brains are hardwired to remember the first and last bits of a conversation whilst glossing over the middle part (source: WeQ).
> 3 votes

# Answer
The closest thing I can think of to what you are talking about is loosely referred to as 'Push-Pull'. It happens in a lot of unhealthy relationships and is a favorite tactic of so-called pickup artists. Used appropriately it can be healthy, but it is typically a manipulation tactic. https://outofthefog.website/top-100-trait-blog/2015/11/4/push-pull
> 2 votes

# Answer
**Sugarcoat** also fits. If this is intentional in order to have them under control, this can be said as a form of **manipulation**.

A reverse effect that the actor may not be aware of that the recipient chose to remember the good information only. This can be described as **cherrypick**.
> 1 votes

# Answer
I'm not sure it has an established name, (perhaps "lead with the negative", "bad news first", or “get the bad news out of the way”) but research suggests that people prefer to hear the bad news before the good ones... even though that might lower their chances of changing behavior in reaction to the bad news. (For a free but longer summary of the study see this PT page).

The body of research in this area is fairly thin though, so I wouldn't put too much stock in it.
> 1 votes

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Tags: social-psychology, terminology, behavior
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title: What constitutes an emotional disorder?

text:
# Question
Title: What constitutes an emotional disorder?
Watson, et al. (2008) states that a superclass of mood and anxiety disorders should be given a nonspecific label, such as ‘emotional disorders’.

They stated that this superclass

> can be decomposed into three subclasses: the distress disorders (major depression, dysthymic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder), the fear disorders (panic disorder, agoraphobia, social phobia, specific phobia), and the bipolar disorders (bipolar I, bipolar II, cyclothymia).

There have been different remits put forward in Neurophysiology, Psychology and Psychopathology journals to define what constitutes an emotional disorder.

Goldberg, et al. (2009) says they include:

> generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), unipolar depression, panic disorder, phobic disorders, obsessional states, dysthymic disorders, post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and somatoform disorders. We have also included neurasthaenia, as this diagnosis is commonly made in many parts of the world, and is in the ICD‐10. We have preferred the term ‘emotional’ because we include somatoform disorders in the group.

yet, Baek (2014) says:

> Typical emotional disorders are anxiety disorder, depression, and bipolar disorder

Sung, et al. (2016) pointed out that

> The term ‘emotional disorders’ is not a clearly defined medical term, but is commonly used to refer to psychological disorders (e.g., generalized anxiety disorders and major depressive disorders) that appear to affect the emotions. ‘Emotional disorders’ in this study refers to the symptoms of anxiety and depression

Where there are moves to improve the diagnostic procedures for mental disorders through systems such as HiTOP (Stony Brook Medicine, 2017; Kotov, et al., 2017) — see also my answer to How does a person know if he should seek treatment for depression since feeling moody is unavoidable? — has there been any attempt since 2016 to put together definitive criteria to determine what constitutes an *emotional disorder*?

## References

Baek, S. B. (2014). Psychiatric rehabilitation of emotional disorders. *Journal of Exercise Rehabilitation, 10*, 205–208. 10.12965/jer.140143

Goldberg, D. P., Krueger, R. F., Andrews, G., & Hobbs, M. J. (2009). Emotional disorders: Cluster 4 of the proposed meta-structure for DSM-V and ICD-11. *Psychological Medicine, 39*, 2043–2059. 10.1017/S0033291709990298

Kotov, R. et al., 2017. The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP): A dimensional alternative to traditional nosologies. *Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 126*(4), pp. 454-477. doi: 10.1037/abn0000258

Stony Brook Medicine (2017). *The Hierarchical Taxonomy Of Psychopathology (HiTOP)*. \[Online\]
Available at: https://medicine.stonybrookmedicine.edu/HITOP/publications

Sung, C. W., Chen, K. Y., Chiang, Y. H., Chiu, W. T., Ou, J. C., Lee, H. C., ... Wang, J. Y. (2016). Heart rate variability and serum level of insulin-like growth factor-1 are correlated with symptoms of emotional disorders in patients suffering a mild traumatic brain injury. *Clinical Neurophysiology, 127*, 1629–1638. 10.1016/j.clinph.2015.08.006

Watson, D., O'Hara, M. W., & Stuart, S. (2008). Hierarchical structures of affect and psychopathology and their implications for the classification of emotional disorders. *Depression and Anxiety, 25*(4), 282–288. 10.1002/da.20496

# Answer
> 0 votes
Bullis, at al. (2019) tackled this very question this month, and outlined criteria to determine what an emotional disorder is:

1. The disorder is characterised by the experience of frequent and intense negative emotions;
2. There is an aversive reaction to the emotional experience itself that is driven by the individual's diminished sense of control and negative appraisal of the emotion; and
3. The individual engages in efforts to dampen, escape, or avoid the emotional experience, either preemptively or in reaction to the onset of a negative emotional state.

The paper also expands on each of the criteria and pointed out in the summary that

> these criteria would only be considered an emotional disorder if the associated distress and functional impairment were **chronic and significant**. \[emphasis mine\]

The term *chronic* is well defined within the fields of medicine and mental health, but the question now arises as to how significant is *significant* in order to say that the criteria can be considered?

## References

Bullis, J. R., Boettcher, H., Sauer‐Zavala, S., & Barlow, D. H. (2019). What is an emotional disorder? A transdiagnostic mechanistic definition with implications for assessment, treatment, and prevention. *Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice*, e12278. doi: 10.1111/cpsp.12278

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Tags: abnormal-psychology, neurophysiology, psychology
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# Question
Title: What kind of political views are sociopaths more likely to espouse?
I know of the pretty controversial links between personality and political orientation, in general terms, e.g.

> Although most research examining whether openness and conscientiousness influence political ideology has appeared only within the last decade, support for the expected openness-liberalism and conscientiousness-conservatism links already is voluminous.

I'm curious if studies have looked at the finer correlations of abnormal psychology and political orientation. Do the extremes of personality lead people to more extreme political orientation of some sort? For instance, does sociopathy predispose to extreme left- or right-wing movements?

# Answer
One 2017 paper does try to correlate the dark tetrad (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and everyday sadism) to extremist political views:

> Previous research on personality and political attitudes has been conducted in countries where political parties from the center dominate the political system. In the present research (N = 675), we focus on the relationship between the dark side of human personality and political orientation and extremism, respectively, in the course of a presidential election where the two candidates represent either left-wing or right-wing political policies \[Austrian presidential election of 2016\]. Narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and everyday sadism were associated with right-wing political orientation, whereas narcissism and psychopathy were associated with political extremism. Moreover, the relationships between personality and right-wing political orientation and extremism, respectively, were relatively independent from each other.

Going the other way around, a 2019 review of research on the psychological profiling of extremists doesn't quite tie them with any particular personality (disorder) but it does generally correlate them with psychological distress:

> Empirical findings support a relationship between psychological distress and extreme political ideologies. Compared with moderates, political extremists—on both the left and right of the spectrum—report stronger anxiety about their economic future (van Prooijen, Krouwel, Boiten, & Eendebak, 2015). Furthermore, extremists are more suspicious than moderates about governmental institutions, suggesting distressed expectations of these institutions (Inglehart, 1987). Experimental findings are consistent with these insights. For instance, people psychologically compensate for feelings of uncertainty and fear through strong ideological convictions (McGregor, Prentice, & Nash, 2013), and inducing a loss of significance increases extreme beliefs on both the left and right (Webber et al., 2018).
>
> The link between psychological distress and political extremism is inconsistent with the assumption of the rigidity-of-the-right model that psychological distress stimulates conservative ideologies only. We note, however, that psychological distress stimulates a preference for leaders who, in addition to being radical, are also group-oriented (Hogg, Meehan, & Farquharson, 2010). Feelings of distress therefore make political currents that are not only extreme but also nationalistic particularly appealing. Indeed, the majority of studies indicating a right-wing shift under conditions of uncertainty were conducted in Western countries where the political currents that combine radicalism with nationalism happen to be right wing (e.g., the United States, several European Union, or EU, member states; Jost, 2017). Would distress exert similar effects in countries where the political currents that combine radicalism with nationalism are mostly located on the left, such as Venezuela (i.e., Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro), Ecuador (i.e., Evo Morales), or Nicaragua (i.e., Daniel Ortega; e.g., Müller, 2016)?

The review paper goes to discuss "cognitive simplicity" (by this they mean a black-and-white perception of the social world), overconfidence, and intolerance as other established (if somewhat obvious) psychological traits of extremists.

I guess a tentative conclusion from this might be that personality abnormalities (beyond those discrete traits) don't feature high on the psychological profile of extremists (i.e. there might a few psychopaths among the extremists, but most extremists might be just "suffering" from those four discrete traits). Or perhaps more research is needed.
> 3 votes

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Tags: personality, political-psychology
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# Question
Title: Can drugs support emotional developement in personality disorders?
Some personality disorders are associated with a degree of **emotional blindness** or coldness with narcissistic PD being such an example. I wonder whether there are drugs that - in addition to psychotherapy - aid in the process of learning to feel, express and cope with emotions.

Particularly, I wonder if **antidepressants** might be effective in this task. Serotonin ADs help to handle anxiety and depression and taken long-term might even heal things like social anxiety and generalized anxiety. Depression is also linked to somewhat reduced brain activity. The same holds for norepinephrine. Dopamine antagonists are also said to support the feelings of pleasure and motivation. The question is if these effects are permanent or tend to disappear or worsen upon discontinuation.

Moreover, some ADs are believed to induce "emotional flatness" which would possibly hinder the process of healing through psychotherapy.

> It is known that SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) antidepressants, after taken for a while or taken one after another (if the doctor is trying to see what works), can cause what is called "emotional blunting". In this instance, the individual in question is often unable to cry, even if he or she wants to. In other cases, the person may seem fully present but operate merely intellectually when emotional connection would be appropriate. This may present an extreme difficulty in giving or receiving empathy and can be related to the spectrum of narcissistic personality disorder.\[1\]

As far as I know the amygdala is the part of the brain responsible for handling emotions. My question is if there are drugs that directly stimulate neuronal growth in amygdala to improve emotional processing.

\[1\] Johnson, Stephen M (1987), Humanizing the Narcissistic Style, NY: Norton and Co., p. 125, ISBN 0-393-70037-2

# Answer
This question is a bit broad. The main reason it can be easily answered is that the answer is mostly no. According to a 2016 recent review:

* for cluster A personality disorders, which among other things feature low empathy and social aversion there's not a lot going on regarding pharmacotherapy:

> Patients with schizotypal personality disorder have been analyzed in few small open-label studies using typical and atypical antipsychotics. There are no randomized controlled trials for patients with schizoid or paranoid personality disorder, and there is not a robust evidence about the efficacy of psychoactive drugs in these patients.

* for cluster B (which include narcissistic and borderline PD) there is more pharmacotherapy in practice, in particular for the latter:

> Antidepressants, anxiolytics, antipsychotics, and mood stabilizers are used by a significantly higher percentage of borderline patients than other people with personality disorders \[...\] Cochrane review found that second-generation antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, and dietary supplementation with omega-3 fatty acids have some beneficial effects in these patients, while antidepressants may be helpful when comorbid conditions are present.

They don't say anything about narcissistic PD, so my guess is pharmacotherapy is not much of much help there.

* for cluster C (which includes avoidant and obsessive-compulsive) they also note briefly that

> There are no randomized controlled trials of drug treatment for cluster C personality disorders, although it can be argued that antidepressants might be of some help. Particularly, in patients with obsessive–compulsive personality disorder, use of SSRIs may be helpful, especially if anxiety is present
> 2 votes

# Answer
I have also found this 2016 presentation on Medications for Borderline Personality disorder. I think it summarizes the topic nicely.

Summary

* Medications **can have a role** in treating BPD
    + *No evidence* for monotherapy for BPD
    + Symptomatic treatment has a *limited evidence* base
        - some evidence for medications for several core BPD symptoms
        - no evidence for medications for some important core symptoms
    + I prefer to *treat comorbidities* rather than engaging in symptomatic treatment
* Be sensitive to the impact of medications on the therapeutic alliance

+ There will be transference issues around you and your medications
    + Address negative attitudes when you see them
    + Positive transference to sedating medications can be a problem
* Work to establish a collaborative relationship with your patient and the team
* When prescribing:
    + Be clear what you are using each medication for
    + Consider risks (side effects) vs. benefits (evidence base)
    + Avoid disinhibiting and addictive medications wherever possible
    + Consider risk in overdose
    + Be planful about decreasing and/or discontinuing medications

Interestingly, the omega-3 supplements have also been recommended in this source. I wonder how it might possibly work. Also more info on dosage and EPA/DHA ratio would be appropriate.
> 0 votes

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Tags: emotion, personality, abnormal-psychology, brain, psychopharmacology
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