# Question
Title: Open magnetic resonance imaging datasets on psychosis?
Are there any open magnetic resonance imaging datasets of normal and healthy adults (as controls) and psychotic subjects?

Such as ADNI for Alzheimer's or OASIS for aging.

# Answer
The Australian Schizophrenia Research Bank (http://www.schizophreniaresearch.org.au/bank/research-information/information-on-datasample-availability-for-researchers/) has an 'open' database of clinical MRI (T1s and DTI) as well as healthy controls. Access isn't free though - they charge an administration fee to cover costs. It is an ongoing effort and I think there is about 500 MRIs from patients in there now, but I'm not sure what the latest numbers are exactly.
> 1 votes

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Tags: abnormal-psychology, neuroimaging, data
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# Question
Title: Refinements of Rescorla-Wagner model of classical conditioning
The Rescorla-Wagner model is one of the most commonly discussed mathematical models of classical conditioning. It was wildly popular when it came out in 1972, and very successful. The same math, is used in the delta-rule which is a special case of back-propagation with a single layer. In neural network research, the back-propagation algorithm has been refined and replaced over the years. However, for basic classical conditioning, I am not aware of any significant advances over the RW-model. It is still often cited as *the* model for classical conditioning in textbooks.

However, it is well know that there are numerous conditioning experiments the RW-model cannot explain, for a detailed references, see pages 370 to 378 of Miller et al. (1995). Hence the question:

**Is there a modern refinement of the Rescorla-Wagner model that addressed all 23 failures listed in Miller et al. (1995)?** How does this refinement relate to refinements of back-propagation?

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### References

Miller, R.R., Barnet, R.C., & Grahame, N.J. (1995) "Assessment of the Rescorla-Wagner model." Psychological bulletin 117(3): 363-386 \[pdf\]

# Answer
I don't think anyone has ever bothered (though Ralph Miller might disagree), since many of the 'failures' are outside of the model's purview. The model expresses as simply as possible the profound insight that we learn most when our expectations are not met. Many features of learning won't conform to this general principle (spontaneous recovery) but it doesn't make it wrong. Other features of learning emerge when the model is applied in layers or a hierarchy, rather than as a single unit (e.g., rapid reacquisition). Hence there is little pressure to adapt the model, although many adaptions have been proposed to account for one effect or another (e.g., Van Hamme & Wasserman, 1994; Dickinson & Burke, 1996 etc). However these have usually limited it's generalisability due to overfitting.
> 4 votes

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Tags: mathematical-psychology, reinforcement-learning, behaviorism, conditioning
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# Question
Title: What are some good references for preprocessing and analysis of the P300 response from EEG data in Python?
I have just started to work on problems in neuroscience on my own. I sought to analyze the P300 response from EEG data because I was trying to understand a Kaggle.com challenge that used it. I found a few available datasets online, a couple of which were from BCI competitions, but have not been able to successfully separate the signals with the P300 response from those without the response. So far, I have subtracted the average of a channel from the channel and run a bandpass filter on the data. This seems to produce good looking data, but looking for the associated event related potential (ERP) leads to inclusive results.

It appears that the data from the BCI competition may not be easy to analyze, but it is the most documented P300 response with available data that I can find. That said, some of the techniques used involve mathematical functions such as principal component analysis (PCA), linear discriminant analysis (LDA), and T-weights to find the signal and classify and analyze it. I am aware of references available for these mathematical techniques but not in the context of neuroscience.

Furthermore, I am aware that there are some EEG analysis toolboxes for Python, but it is more important for me to understand the data than to feed it through a black box. Also, I have found these toolboxes rather undocumented.

# Answer
I don't exactly what it is you are after, but if you are looking for other analyzing techniques, you should try **Independent Component Analysis** (ICA). I have heard (but I do not have references) that ICA is better than PCA analyses.

A very neat (and free) Matlab toolbox that has this function is FieldTrip (http://www.fieldtriptoolbox.org/). It is a nicely documented toolbox, including an easy to follow walk through and multiple tutorials, starting from reading in the EEG data, all the way to statistical analyses. FieldTrip is probably your best bet in finding the P300 differences, and still understanding what happens with the data (since you have to specify everything yourself).
> 1 votes

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Tags: theoretical-neuroscience, eeg, mathematical-psychology, signal-detection, p300
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# Question
Title: What factors influence a person or group of people's empathy toward another group?
The recent Paris terrorist attack highlights the discrepancy in the levels of empathy that Western people feel toward other Western people, compared to the empathy they feel toward Middle-Eastern people for example, who suffer such attacks regularly.

The question is:

* How can a person or group of people's empathy be measured?
* What factors influence this level of empathy?

Have any studies been done on this subject?

# Answer
Empathy can be measured in many different ways. As this source outlines:

> Psychologists distinguish between measurements of situational empathy—that is, empathic reactions in a specific situation—and measurements of dispositional empathy, where empathy is understood as a person's stable character trait. Situational empathy is measured either by asking subjects about their experiences immediately after they were exposed to a particular situation, by studying the “facial, gestural, and vocal indices of empathy-related responding” (Zhou, Valiente, and Eisenberg 2003, 275), or by various physiological measures such as the measurement of heart rate or skin conductance.

Empathy is influenced by a very wide range of factors. Some are innate (e.g., one's capacity for empathy), some are due to upbringing and some are related to the characteristics of the individual or group involved (e.g, their familiarity, or appearance). I couldn't find a comprehensive list of these different factors (probably as there are too many), but \[1,2,3,4\] should give you a sense of the range of factors.

Please let me know if you require any further clarification such as a more specific question.

References:

McDonald, Nicole M., and Daniel S. Messinger. "The development of empathy: How, when, and why." Moral Behavior and Free Will: A Neurobiological and Philosophical Aprroach (2011): 341-368.

\[2\] JACKSON, P. L., MELTZOFF, A. N. & DECETY, J. 2005. How do we perceive the pain of others? A window into the neural processes involved in empathy. NeuroImage, 24, 771-779.

\[3\] GALLESE, V. 2003. The roots of empathy: The shared manifold hypothesis and the neural basis of intersubjectivity. Psychopathology, 36, 171-180.

\[4\] CHAPMAN, E., BARON-COHEN, S., AUYEUNG, B., KNICKMEYER, R., TAYLOR, K. & HACKETT, G. 2006. Fetal testosterone and empathy: Evidence from the Empathy Quotient (EQ) and the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” Test. Social Neuroscience, 1, 135-148.
> 1 votes

# Answer
Empathy cant be measured, however it can be judged by a person's actions in routine life. If a person is generally sensitive to other's feelings irrespective of age, gender, specie, he can be called to have Empathy generally. Another person might empathize with his children, but not with others say that of his neighbors, so he may be judged as a less empathetic person. It is greatly influenced by relationship. A person is greatly protective about own children, but he may infact wish harm for those of his enemies. The reason for loss of Empathy in this case is the animosity he shares with that other person. No offence to anyone for the following views.
It is also influenced by cultures and religions. Islam as a culture is less empathetic towards all and so they have more instance of violence in their community. It is just an observation.
> -4 votes

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Tags: empathy
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# Question
Title: In what order do you preprocess EEG data?
I am fairly new to EEG research and I am unsure what the best ordering is for preprocessing data. Do you correct for baseline and filter the data before you go on with artifact rejection/correction, or the other way around?

I can imagine the former to be correct, because baseline correction and filtering makes it easier to interpret the data visually, making it easier to identify artifacts. However, if you filter the data first, some artifacts may become less severe, making it difficult to have artifact rejection be done automatically.

What are your thoughts?

# Answer
You kind of have to do some kind of baseline correction first (or a highpass filter on the unepoched data) because of slow drifting. Lowpass filtering before artifact rejection is fine as long as you don't ever go back to the unfiltered signal in your analyses.

After that, you can either throw out trials that exceed a set threshold, or you can do a two-step artifact rejection procedure. For the two-step rejection throw out anything beyond a large threshold. Then throw out any trials with points that exceed a set number of standard deviations from the mean of all trials at each time point.

The reason I say that filtering before artifact rejection is okay is because the artifacts that you are filtering out should not be related to the brain activity you are interested in. This is reasonable for frequencies above, say, 50Hz, because that should just be external and muscle noise. Anything lower than that could affect task-related brain activity, say eye movements for example. You might not want to include trials where the subject was looking away from the screen or closed their eyes.
> 4 votes

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Tags: methodology, eeg, data, analysis
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# Question
Title: fMRI images: In-plane resolution, slice thickness
I have a set of fMRI images (.nii.gz). Now I want to infer the in-plane resolution and the slice thickness. Can this information and perhaps additional information be retrieved with FSL or Matlab? And yes, how?

Or can I calculate it somehow?

# Answer
The information you seek is contained in the header of the image file. Matlab has open source tools for reading the header information. e.g., http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/29344-read-medical-data-3d

If you want an even more open source option, NiBabel is an open source python library for reading .nii files (header and image). I think the command print(header.get\_data\_shape()) will return the image dimensions. See http://nipy.org/nibabel/nibabel\_images.html#the-image-header for instructions.
> 2 votes

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Tags: fmri
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# Question
Title: Does the human visual system implement (adaptive) histogram equalization?
The human visual system is very good at 'cancelling out' shadows and other lightning effects, and focusing on the contrast in images. A famous example of this is Adelson's checker shadow illusion:

In the above image, cell A and B are the same exact colour, yet we see cell B as significantly lighter than cell B.

In this case, if I wanted to get a machine to make an observation similar to the human perception, I would use a technique like adaptive histogram equalization to enhance the contrasts and eliminate the shadows and lighting effects.

In computational terms, histogram equalization works by taking the cumulative distribution of the histogram of pixel intensities and stretching it to be a line. This transformation makes the histogram uniform, and thus maximizes the entropy and amount of information conveyed by each bit -- giving an information theoretic justification for why one would want detectors that use this sort of transform. Adaptive histogram equalization works the same way but instead of transforming the global histogram, first divides the image into a large number of tiles and then normalizes each tile. This tends to amplify the signal, while 'cancelling out' the local background due to effects like shadows or lighting gradients.

Laughlin (1981) showed that the large monopolar cells in the insect compound eye -- specifically in *Calliphora stygia* -- implement histogram equalization through their neural coding to cancel out the ambient contrast of typical natural scenes. **Has something similar been shown in vertebrate visual systems?** In particular, in the human -- or similar -- visual system?

Further, Laughlin (1981) could not look at adaptation of the eye to a specific scene, and was comparing to a static typical environment, has this research been extended to look at dynamic changes in the coding pattern in response to specific scenes?

## References

Laughlin, S. (1981). A simple coding procedure enhances a neuron's information capacity. *Zeitschrift für Naturforschung* c, 36(9-10), 910-912.

# Answer
> 2 votes
This isn't exactly what you are referring to, but I think provides a similar function and has been shown in vertebrate vision:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization\_model

Divisive normalization as a canonical computation across the brain

While this does not implement histogram equalization, I think it is actually a better-suited explanation of the checker board illusion - because local luminance and contrast normalises the activity of all neurons in the area.

Again, this doesn't quite answer your question but maybe provides an alternative computational step occurring in vertebrates?

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Tags: neuroscience, perception, theoretical-neuroscience, vision, computational-modeling
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# Question
Title: Dependency EEG signals from regions of the brain
When we record an EEG signals, we apply an ICA on it. This algorithm assumes that the sources of signals are independent.

Could I assume that each region in the brain works independently, i.e., the region that the point C3 represents, is independent of the region that the point CZ represents?

# Answer
> 3 votes
The EEG signals between these regions will not be independent. The electrical activity that is being measured at the scalp, is the result of electrical flow inside the brain. This flow does not go in just one direction. It 'smears out' a little bit to surrounding areas, since the entire scalp/body is conductive.

Another reason that the activity measured at different sites is not completely independent is because brain areas interact with each other. The old Brodman Area topography is kind of outdated, and made place for networks of activity. To say that each channel is independent is thus inherently false.

ICA does assume independent sources, but with this they do not mean the channels. For example, the ICA finds a pattern, e.g. jumps of blinks, in, say, 15 channels. ICA then assumes that they are caused by only one thing, and this pattern will thus be extracted to only one component, not two. The different components, which are the result of an ICA, are thus in fact the independent sources.

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Tags: eeg, signal-detection
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title: Caller's dilemma

text:
# Question
Title: Caller's dilemma
A close friend, who is going through a mentally rough and disturbed period, just called me, and it made me come up with a question.

You call a close friend and someone picks up; but you're not sure from the voice whether it's your friend or someone with a similar voice, so your (sub)conscious faces a dilemma:

a) if it's a stranger I better not talk to them as a close friend because that could be embarrassing, so I should assume it's a stranger first and talk formally

b) if it's my friend, I better not talk to them formally as a stranger because that would be awkward, so I should assume it's my friend first and talk without façade

My question is: what, in the (sub)conscious, determines that choice for a given individual?

# Answer
You might want to look at some decision making literature. A nice and easy to understand theory is the Drift Diffusion model. This model works with binary decisions, and argues that "evidence", an subconscious representation of it, for either one of the options is accumulated over time. The option that accumulates enough evidence, i.e. when it exceeds a certain threshold, the quickest, is the option one chooses for. See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-alternative\_forced\_choice .

If you want to know more about it, you might also want to look at the Linear Ballistic Accumulater theory. That is a more recent theory of decision making and, perhaps, a more correct one.
> 2 votes

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Tags: personality, decision-making
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# Question
Title: Why do hallucinations appear in depression?
We all know the stories of people who saw a miracle in the deepist troubles like gangsters who turned to faith \- or an older example could be the miracles in jail in the Bible (Acts: Peter and Paul).

How wide-spread is the phenomenon where people expierence hallucinations in a depressing situation? What is the neurological cause? And what hormones (neurotrasmitters) participate on this phenomenon?

Please concentrate on the neurological point of view, rather than on the psychological aspects.

Thank you.

# Answer
Have a look at The God drug DMT. It causes people to see/talk to God and can be taken as an actual drug, but I believe it is also produced in the body during near death experiences. I am no expert in it but here's wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/N,N-Dimethyltryptamine
> 3 votes

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Tags: cognitive-neuroscience, depression, hallucinations
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# Question
Title: Why would the brain flip the images perceived by your eyes?
The following is a common scientific statement, which you don't have to google long for to find:

> The eye views images upside-down in the manner of a camera lens, but our brains reinterpret this input to allow us to see things the correct way up.

My first question is quite straightforward: **Is this statement valid?**

I don't understand why you should come to the conclusion that your brain should 'flip' the image. Wouldn't your brain be able to cope just fine without flipping it? If anything I would suspect the brain to *not* flip the image, if there is no reason to do so.

In order for this statement to be valid, I would expect a scientific theory/experiment from which can be concluded that the brain does process the vision in such a way that, after it being processed all subsequent processing occurs on the 'inverted' image. That seems to me to be the most logical interpretation of 'to flip'.

# Answer
It is not meaningful to talk about your brain processing something as 'right-side up"' or 'upside-down'. The 'images' in your brain are just collections of neural activations, and not actual pictures. Thus they cannot have an orientation. The only meaningful way to test your question is to try flipping the input the brain receives and seeing if it can cope.

Fortunately, the brain **is** capable of flipping your visual field if required as measured through perceptual adaptation experiments using inversion glasses. This has been demonstrated very drastically in studies, by for instance requiring a participant to wear inversion glasses for a long time. At first they are confused, and unable to orient themselves and do basic tasks, however after enough time the brain can adopt enough to even do activities like riding a bike. This suggests that from the only way you can measure things (i.e. behaviorally) the brain is capable of adapting to an upside down world (some participants even reported that after extended use the world even seemed "right side up"). This is functionally equivalent to the brain being able to process your visual information in either orientation. If it is capable of processing in either orientation, the question of "does my brain flip the image" becomes a pseudo-question and unanswerable.

### References

* Taylor, J. G. (1962). The behavioral basis of perception. New Haven: Yale University Pres
* Harris, C.S. (1965) "Perceptual adaptation to inverted, reversed, and displaced vision." Psychological Review 72(6): 419-444. \[pdf\]\]
* Di Paolo, E.A. (2003) "Organismically-inspired robotics: homeostatic adaptation and teleology beyond the closed sensorimotor loop", {Dynamical systems approach to embodiment and sociality: 19-42 \[pdf
> 47 votes

# Answer
I think part of what makes this question confusing is the use of expressions like "what the eye sees", "what the brain sees" and "what the frog's eye tells the frog's brain". Nobody sees anything except the experiencing subject. When one stops thinking that the brain (or some visual-system part of the brain) observes the image on the retina, then the question of whether anything is being flipped becomes meaningless.

As regards perceptual adaptation, it is interesting to note that it is not universal. In Sperry's famous frog-eye-inversion experiment, the frogs never adapted.

**References**

* Roger W. Sperry (1943). Effect of 180 Degree Rotation of the Retinal Field on Visuomotor Coordination. *The Journal of Experimental Zoology* 92 (3): 263–279
> 20 votes

# Answer
The fact that the image does not *appears* upside-down has to do with the way visual information is processed in the brain. In his book, Jeff Hawkins argues that the low-level visual features on the retina (being upside down, distorted, and changing rapidly) are lost in the process of forming invariant representation. And it's those representations that we experience consciously.

From On Intelligence (official site, pdf)

> The light receptors in your retina are unevenly distributed. They are densely concentrated in the fovea at the center, and get gradually sparser out in the periphery. In contrast, the cells in the cortex are evenly distributed. The result is that the retinal image relayed onto the primary visual area, V1, is highly distorted \[*and upside-down, if you will*\]. When your eyes fixate on the nose of a face versus on an eye of the same face, the visual input is very different, as though it is being viewed through a distorting fisheye lens that is jerking violently to and fro. Yet when you see the face, it doesn't appear distorted, and it doesn't appear to be jumping around. Most of the time you aren't even aware that the retinal pattern has changed at all, let alone so dramatically. You just see "face." (Figure 2b shows this effect on a view of a beach landscape.) This is a restatement of the mystery of invariant representation we talked about in chapter 4, on memory. What you "perceive" is not what V1 sees. How does your brain ever know it is looking at the same face, and why don't you know the inputs are changing and distorted?

*The process of forming invariant representations is explained in the book, but I won't quote it there because its quite long.*
> 12 votes

# Answer
There are many transformations between the light hitting your retina and your perception of the world.

The signals from your retina initially travel through the visual pathways to reach your visual cortex, where visual information is processed. The representation of this visual information in your brain is also shaped by other brain activity representing your other senses (sound, touch, etc) and also internal processes like your current mood or expectations.

By the time all of this information is incorporated into your conscious perception, the orientation of the photons as they hit your retina is gone and all you have is your brain's interpretation of the world around you.
> 3 votes

# Answer
It is **not the case that the brain flips the retinal image**, **nor does it have to**, **nor are there any images in the brain like there are on the retina**. It is **just as meaningless to say that the retinal image is upside down in relation to the orientation of our perceptions**.

Richard L. Gregory gives a nice explanation:

> It is generally accepted that this does not need a special compensation mechanism because retinal images are not seen, as objects are seen \[…\]. A compensating mechanism is not needed as they are not objects of perception but rather one stage of processing lying between objects and vision. \[…\] When the head is tilted, the world remains upright. This extends to standing on one's head, when the retinal image is reversed and yet up and down remain normal. (Richard L. Gregory (2004): Illusions, In: The Oxford Companion to the Mind, 2nd Edition, p. 429).

Another way to grasp this issue is by the difference of physical space and phenomenal space, as Norbert Bischof does:

> We thus have to distinguish a *physical space*, in which our body is located and the brain processes take place, and a *space experience* which the phenomenal world is embedded in. \[… Both\] *cannot be localized* in relation to one another. There is no superordinate coordinate system which they can be jointly fit into. They are \[…\] »incommensurable«, which literally means there is no common scale that could be applied to both. \[…\] (Norbert Bischof (2009): Psychologie, 2nd Edition, pp. 48–49, my translation).

Bischof goes on to state that the retinal image and the consciously experienced phenomenon can not possibly be integrated within one and the same space in the first place, and thus don't stand in any spatial relation whatsoever.
> 2 votes

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Tags: neuroscience, vision, theoretical-neuroscience, philosophy-of-mind
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# Question
Title: Mapping Sustained Attention on the brain (EEG)
I am doing a study to the effects of sustained attention on Situation Awareness, i.e. how well one perceives and understands the relevant information in their direct environment (in both space and time) and the ability to make predictions about the near future. I want to use EEG to measure the participants sustained attention by calculating the mean power in the Alpha frequency band, over two second periods.

I am in doubt however, over which channels I should calculate this average. Perceptual related brain responses usually occur in the occipital lobe and other more posterior located regions, but where do I draw the line? Are there some references that may support such a decision?

# Answer
You should consider using subject-specific alpha channels and frequency ranges. There are differences between individuals in alpha peak frequency. Also the placement of the EEG cap as well as small differences in orientations of cortex can affect which channels pick up perceptual activity.

One way to do this would be to record data from the subject with their eyes open and then their eyes closed, say for 60 seconds each. Then you can find the channels where there is a significant difference in power around the alpha range between these two conditions. You can also use this data to determine the peak frequency of each subject's alpha.
> 6 votes

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Tags: reference-request, eeg, attention, situation-awareness
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# Question
Title: What is the scientific support for Einstein's claim about the negative effects of reading too much?
Einstein once said:

> Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking, just as the man who spends too much time in the theater is tempted to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life.

* **What is the scientific claim implicit in this quote?**
* **Is it true that reading too much makes the mind lazy, and is reading too much harmful to the mind?**

\*Quote from an interview with G.S. Viereck, "What Life Means to Einstein," *Saturday Evening Post*, October 26, 1929; re-printed in Viereck, *Glimpses of the Great*, 437.

# Answer
*This answer is a bit more anecdotal, but perhaps it's useful*.

From the perspective of an academic researcher (which perhaps is similar to Einstein's perspective), there is a balance between reading the literature and conducting your own research. There is a balance between learning new skills and applying those skills to your own projects. Even within the context of learning, there is a balance between reading how something is done and practicing actually doing it.

The very process of conducting your own research reveals challenges and gaps in understanding. Reading allows you to take on new information, however, doing good research also requires time to re-arrange ideas, refine your own theories. Furthermore, reading can vary in the degree to which it is a passive or active process. As an active process, choosing what to read, critically evaluating reading, is all part of building knowledge and ideas.

These ideas manifest in many places in curriculum design. A PhD thesis in particular is a good example of a project that requires a balance between understanding the existing literature and independent thought.

I presume that the quote is just a useful linguistic device to get people to think about this balancing process.
> 14 votes

# Answer
I think what Einstein had in mind is that in order to come up with original ideas one must keep a balance between knowledge and creativity, as already stated by Jeromy Anglim.

In a paper titled "The Composing Process and the Academic Composing Process" written by Stephen Krashen, Krashen says:

> Although there is no empirical research on this hypothesis, writing experts recommend that academics begin writing before doing their “literature review”(more about that later) and before they think about gathering data. They recommend beginning by putting their ideas in outline form, or in any kind of planning format that feels comfortable. Peter Elbow explains the reason for this: It’s much easier to write in the beginning when you know less about a topic.

Relevant to the question: The Academic Composing Process (page 7)

Link for the full article: http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/articles/2005\_composing\_&\_academic\_process\_krashen.pdf
> 5 votes

# Answer
Einstein might have a fair point of view in this manner. He presumably is pointing out the balance between reading and creative thinking. too much reading causes people to not question critically and refrain from interpreting ideas in their own unique way, whereas reading and learning at your own rate and time can lead to more promising ways of understanding the critical view of the world. Take the time to process and think about what you want to know, but even more important is to look at something through your own perspective and to not take the view that a book might give you. you are an individual and we all think differently :)
> 3 votes

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Tags: intelligence, reading
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title: Can MBTI be measured objectively?

text:
# Question
Title: Can MBTI be measured objectively?
I'm trying to figure out how MBTI would be operationalized in scientific research. How could one operationalize the different types, E, I, N, S, T, F, P and J? How could one look at numerical measurements of individuals and say "That is an E"?

Is there any research on objective differences between the types (without using NEO-PI-R or other Big5 inventories as the objective reference)?

# Answer
The main question here is "is there any scientific research into objective differences between people with MBTI types?" I suppose a second question is "does this research actually SHOW differences?". This is one aspect of the debate about the validity of MBTI, which is covered in other questions (e.g., this one).

There is not as much research as you might think, which is because most scientists avoid the MBTI. It is a commercial product (you have to pay for it) with poor reliability, which means that scientific psychology tends to use better-validated and published scales. This recent meta analysis includes MBTI as one of the "ipsative" measures, finding little validity for predicting occupation. This paper is similar and suggests that normative measures like the MBTI can predict GPA and job performance, although they do so less well than the Big Five. I haven't found any other studies looking more closely at behaviour, although given that some people consider the Big Five to subsume MBTI types, you could look for that instead.
> 5 votes

# Answer
There is research ongoing to correlate MBTI with quantitative, neurological data. Dario Nardi, for example, has found differences in EEG patterns between people of different types. Here is a PDF from him on the topic.
> 2 votes

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Tags: personality, mbti
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# Question
Title: What's the opposite of major depressive disorder?
Bipolar disorder, BD, involves manic episodes and depressive episodes.

If someone has a depressive episode, that person may have major depressive disorder, MDD or BD.

If someone has a manic episode, that person may have \___________ or BD.

So, what is the opposite of MDD?

It seems that "mania" is a term that describes an episode. So "mania" is the opposite of "depression" rather than "MDD".

Is there a major mania disorder? I have heard of kleptomania and pyromania which appear to be classified as impulse control disorders but nothing that appears to be analogous to major depressive disorder

# Answer
There are two ways to interpret/answer this question. First, is there a recognized disorder that is characterized by mania in the absence of depression? Second, are there people who experience mania in the absence of depression?

The answer to the first interpretation is no. There is currently no "major manic disorder" or "unipolar mania." Given the DSM-5 criteria, a person with mania in the absence of depression would likely receive a diagnosis of Bipolar I Disorder, which is the same diagnosis that they would get if they had mania with depression.

The answer to the second interpretation is obviously more difficult. I don't have concrete data, but it appears to be rare. See the following link for an interesting discussion.

Why no unipolar mania listing in DSM-IV?
> 3 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, abnormal-psychology, terminology, depression, bipolar-disorder
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# Question
Title: Insensitivity of MEG to inhomogeneous conductivity
Why MEG is not sensitive to inhomogeneous conductivity profile of different brain compartments (scalp,skull and brain) but EEG is sensitive to that?

# Answer
MEG measures magnetic fields and EEG measures electrical potentials.

One property of magnetic fields is that organic matter (scalp, skull, and brain) does not block them in any significant way.

Electrical potentials measured on the scalp, on the other hand, are definitely affected by the matter between the source of the signal and the location they are measured. This is because the scalp, skull, and brain provide significant resistance to the flow of electrons.
> 2 votes

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Tags: eeg, meg
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# Question
Title: Is it possible for a person to have anterograde amnesia and be aware of it?
In "Memento" the main character has got anterograde amnesia, but he's aware of it. Is it even possible and how, if it is? Compare it to "50 First Dates" — the heroine is not aware of her condition.

Imagine you wake up in the morning. How would you come to awareness that you've got anterograde amnesia, if you don't remember anything since the moment you got it, including that? And even if you find this out by logical thinking, you'll forget it soon (in "Memento", what, in several minutes?)

# Answer
> 6 votes
Yes it is possible. It is very common for normal individuals to feel like they should remember something, but are then unable to actually recall the contents of that particular memory. This *feeling of knowing* is called metamemory.

This study by Art Shimamura and Larry Squire found that

> patients with severe anterograde amnesia can produce accurate feeling-of-knowing judgments. Thus, impaired feeling-of-knowing accuracy is not an obligatory feature of amnesia

So, some of those patients may wake up each morning and soon realize that something is amiss, as they are unable to recall facts or events that they feel they should be able to recall.

# Answer
> 4 votes
A very famous neurological patient, Henry Molaison (known as H.M. in the literature until his death) had severe anterograde amnesia. I don't believe he remembered the details of his condition, but he knew that he couldn't remember things, and he knew that something was wrong with him. I have never read any solid explanation of how that might work; I have heard a conjecture that when it is the hippocampi that are primarily affected, then the patient is aware, but this theory becomes a bit doubtful when you realize that H.M. had more extensive damage than was initially thought (it was not only his hippocampus that was extracted but the entire medial temporal lobe).

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Tags: short-term-memory, amnesia
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title: How are movements stored in the brain?

text:
# Question
Title: How are movements stored in the brain?
The high level flow of information through the brain for the purpose of motor control is well established. It is also known the cerebellum stores many different movements, while also participating in the fine-tuning and coordination of movements. However, how are these movements stored? Are they stored on a per-limb basis, based on activity or by some other methodology entirely?

# Answer
> 4 votes
Forgive me for not including any scientific references (I've been out of the human movement science for a while), but it is believed that movements are saved and executed in a "goal-directed" way. It is not the case that every muscle has its own area and they are individually activated on a scale of 0 (no contraction) -100 (max contraction) depending on the movement you make.

So let us look at the smallest units of a movement, the motor/muscle unit (wiki). This is a group of muscle cells that is activated by one efferent neuron. Several muscle units, over several muscles, are activated per movement. The brain cells that activate the neurons that stimulates these motor units are stored in groups, and will/can be activated simultaneously/shortly after one another (but I will not go into the matter of timing).

It is possible for the same movement to be be executed by different sets of muscle units (otherwise doing repetitive bicep curls, for instance, is impossible. The relaxation of muscle fibers is not that fast enough to allow repetitive activation). All these sets of muscle units, or the brains cells that are responsible for activating them, are thus stored nearby each other.

When you are a novice, the brain cells are not organized in a very neat way. It varies a lot which cells are activated together, and this explains the variability of your movement; sometimes, wrong motor units are activated. However, with practice, the connections between the "correct" cells will become stronger, and more specialized groups of cells will form. Moreover, more cells will be "made available" (also called scaffolding) for these type of movements . This cán be seen in the homunculus (the bigger hands e.g. represent more fine-tuned motor control of the fingers). This will improve the odds of executing the movement correctly, and allows you to fine-tune your movements.

If you want references, I'd suggest searching in PubMed for motor control, neuromechanics, learning and scaffolding (making cells available). Here is a website that tells the entire story of taking a motor action, including planning and control of the cerebellum. I omitted these parts of to story so to only focus on the "storing" of the movements.

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Tags: theoretical-neuroscience, motor
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# Question
Title: If I think of a checkerboard, is there a similar structure to see in my visual cortex?
When I´m imagining a checkerboard in my mind, can one find, with all kinds of fancy equipment, a corresponding figure in the area of my visual cortex? For example, the neurons firing in such a way as they do when actually seeing a board, in which case the firing neurons obvious have the shape of a chessboard.

When I've seen a lot of chessboards I can imagine one by the same pattern of firing neurons (which have for this particular case all different, or more or less the same connection strengths) as in the actual case of seeing one.

# Answer
> 9 votes
Probably. What you mentioned in your question is called retinotopy. There is a mapping between locations on your retina and areas on your cortex. As you go further up the visual processing streams, the mapping gets more complex and the patterns would be less obvious.

Here's an image of from a 1988 paper in the Journal of Neuroscience (Tootell, et al.). It shows a visual pattern on the left, and the corresponding neurons that were activated by that pattern in a monkey's primary visual cortex. The pattern was created using a technique called *Deoxyglucose Labeling*, where active neurons absorb a radioactive substance which can later be detected during dissection.

Also, Here's something similar in a mouse brain using a different technique.

Your question is about **imagining** a visual image, though. That is more complicated and research is currently underway to answer that question. Evidence points towards similar cortical patterns between imagined and perceived stimuli. Here is a study, not as detailed as the mouse or monkey ones, that found some evidence for retinotopy during imagining visual stimuli. Here is another where researchers could decode an imagined visual stimulus through fMRI. And here is yet another using fMRI to detect the direction of imagined motion.

There is a huge difference between the precise results from the animal perception studies and the human imagining studies. One big difference is that it is very difficult or impossible to do invasive studies with humans where you can get such high precision. Another difficulty with this research is knowing exactly when and what someone is imagining. It's easy to correlate brain activity with an external stimulus, because you know exactly what is occurring. All you have for the imagining case is self-report, which can be flawed.

Anyway, the research is progressing and there will be a good answer to this question soon enough.

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Tags: cognitive-neuroscience, vision, imagery
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# Question
Title: What's this cognitive bias that relates to misremembering exact stimuli?
Say a participant is shown a reference stimulus of white colour. Afterwards, they are shown a number of test stimuli that range from yellow to blue like this (yellow -\> less\_yellow -\> whitish -\> white -\> less\_whitish -\> blueish -\> blue) and they are asked to note which one is identical to the reference stimulus

In my experience, the participant is likely to underestimate, and pick the stimulus before the actual "white", but rather somewhere in the area of "whitish". This may be because they're shown stimuli that progressively go towards the target they are looking for, and they are worried they might miss it, and every new stimulus looks more and more like the reference stimulus.

Anyone knows of a psychological bias that relates to this?

Edit: After going through some lists of cognitive biases, contrast effect is similar to what I am referring to, but it does not relate to other facts such as fear of passing the threshold.

Edit2: Less-is-better effect seems to be related to this too.

# Answer
As opposed to the contrast effect which relates to stimuli that are presented simultaneously or in immediate succession, the similar **distinction bias** constitutes a possible/partial explanation for the phenomenon that you conjecture: stimuli are experienced as more distinct when presented simultaneously than when they are presented separately.

Another bias that may play a role here is **anchoring**, which describes the tendency to take that piece of information which is presented first in some context as a reference.

Note that this applies to (perceptual) judgement, not so much to memory/misremembering (but I think that this is what your question is actually about).

I am sceptical regarding the observation of underestimation being more likely. It is possible that some worry to miss leads to a hasty decision, but isn't it equally possible that a more optimistic participant has an opposite tendency, missing the correct stimulus? This will depend on the design, too – it should make a difference whether the displayed series just starts with the yellow sample, shows the blue sample before starting with the yellow, shows the whole continuum before starting at either end, etc.

In general, the **accuracy of perceptual judgement** is the subject of **signal detection theory** which considers tendencies to falsely miss a present target stimulus, or to falsely rate an absent target stimulus as present. Signal detection theory explicitly includes response bias and reasons why responses may be either liberally or conservatively biased.
> 1 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, experimental-psychology, bias
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# Question
Title: Voltage sensitive dyes technique: What is the underlying measure?
I just discovered voltage sensitive dyes technique:

I have seen that figures are labelled with dF/F0, what does it stands for?

# Answer
I found that dF/F0 stands for the relative difference in fluorescence at a certain wavelength.
> 5 votes

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Tags: neuroscience, terminology, neuroimaging, electrophysiology
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# Question
Title: What prevents a neuron from activating an incoming synapse?
As is known, a neuron can have incoming and outgoing synapses. When a neuron fires, what does prevent that only outgoing synapses are activated?

# Answer
Basically there are two reasons. First, (most) synapses are asymmetrically designed in such a way that **synaptic transmission only works in one direction**. Second, **action potentials usually run in one direction only**, from the axon hillock down the axon.

Saying that a neuron fires means that an action potential (AP) is effected, a series of depolarisations along the axon which constitute a signal that moves down the axon, since **APs are usually initiated at the axon hillock**. Neural signal flow thus generally is directed orthodromically, i.e. along the axon and away from the soma.

A synapse is constituted partially by the presynaptic neuron, partially by the postsynaptic neuron. It is the axon terminals, located at the distal end of the presynaptic neuron's axon, which can carry a neural signal further over the synaptic cleft to effect an AP in the postsynaptic neuron. This **generally works in one direction only** – e.g. the presynaptic part of the synapse can release neurotransmitters, and the postsynaptic part of the synapse has receptors for the neurotransmitters, not the other way round (mind that this does not imply that the postsynaptic part of the synapse cannot have any effect on its presynaptic counterpart).

Since the propagation of the AP along the axon basically works through causing neighbouring parts of the axon to depolarize, it would be possible that at some point a **second AP** is generated which runs back **into the direction the original AP came from**. However, **this is prevented by afterhyperpolarization** (also called refractory period): the membrane potential falls below the usual resting potential and thus prevents this running back up of a second, antidromic AP.

The mechanism of afterhyperpolarization is largely responsible for unidirectional propagation. *However*, it has to be emphasized that this only applies if the AP is initiated at the axon hillock in the first place. **If an action potential forms at some point down the axon, it is indeed possible that two APs are generated**, one moving down the axon, another one moving upwards towards the soma. This is called **neural backpropagation**, and while it constitutes an actual phenomenon in the nervous systems, there is not much clarity yet about its (possible) functions. However, the above mentioned unidirectional design of chemical synapses prevents this signal to effect synaptic transmission.

Another phenomenon that can be said to reverse the »normal«, unidirectional flow in neurons is that of electrotonic potentials (but they don't effect anything like antidromic APs), and finally an autapse is a synapse from a neuron's axon onto its own dendrite, so that in some sense it is correct to say that a neuron with an autapse activates an »incoming synapse« (however not in the sense the question seems to imply). Finally, it should also be mentioned that in contrast to chemical synapses, electrical synapses work in both directions (notwithstanding the above).
> 4 votes

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Tags: neuroscience, neurophysiology
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# Question
Title: Simulate colorblindness in non-colorblind individuals
Is there any way by which individuals with normal color vision could "see" the effects of Deuteranopia or any of the common colorblindness types, say by using special lenses or anything?

Color vision deficits can be approximated via filters on *images* or video, but is there any way, via special lenses/eyeware or lighting that normal color vision participants could be made to actually perceive a scene as if they had a color vision deficiency from a normal colored object or representation?

# Answer
One possibility would be to apply those image filters to a live video stream.

Aside from that, you could consider infrared goggles. Not an exact simulation of colorblindness, but it does apparently make red and green into the same color. And if anything, it would let people see the world in differently.
> 7 votes

# Answer
One online tool that is easy to use is Vischeck (http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/) which, in addition to transforming pictures, also can transform whole web pages so that they appear to you as if you were color blind. While it is not experiencing the "world" as if you were color blind, it at least transforms part of the "reality" people navigate in.
> 5 votes

# Answer
Apparently they are in fact glasses that simulate Dichromatic colorblindness developed by Shigeki Nakauchi of Toyohashi University of Technology. I couldn't find published research on how they work or how accurate they are to naturally color blind people, but they appear to be sold at http://www.variantor.com and are used to aid "Universal Color Design".

They only have Dichromatic glasses as that's the most common form of colorblindness. As apparent from the articles mentioning them, they're used more for accessible design than research and have clearly been designed from a "practical" standpoint, only covering the most common form of colorlbindness almost certainly for financial/marketing reasons.

I can't find any incidence of these being used in scientific research however. They sound like they have potential but the Marketing:Science ratio is very high so I remain critical.
> 5 votes

# Answer
The free iPhone/Android app Chromatic Vision Simulator mimics all 3 forms of color deficiency and allows you to apply a percentage of deficit to photos or live camera input.
> 1 votes

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Tags: perception, vision
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# Question
Title: Can one neuron spike inhibit and excite at the same time?
Is it possible to have a neuron that in some synapses releases inhibitory neurotransmitters and excitatory in others (everything triggered by the same spike) ?

# Answer
The textbook convention is that neurons release only one type of chemical from their synaptic terminals. This is known as Dale's Principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale%27s\_principle), and would exclude the possibility that neurons can release both inhibitory and excitatory neurotransmitters.

Examples have been found of neurons which co-release two types of neurotransmitters, such as Glutamate and Dopamine \[1\] or GABA and Dopamine \[2\]. The effect of Dopamine depends on the types of Dopamine receptors in the target neuron, is generally modulatory, and can not be classified as purely excitatory or inhibitory \[3\], which is what your question asked. There is no evidence for neurons which release purely inhibitory and excitatory neurotransmitters, such as GABA and glutamate respectively.

References:

\[1\] Sulzer, D., and S. Rayport. "Dale's principle and glutamate corelease from ventral midbrain dopamine neurons." Amino acids 19.1 (2000): 45-52.

\[2\] Tritsch, Nicolas X., Jun B. Ding, and Bernardo L. Sabatini. "Dopaminergic neurons inhibit striatal output through non-canonical release of GABA." Nature 490.7419 (2012): 262-266.

\[3\] Romanelli RJ, Williams JT, Neve KA (2009). "Chapter 6: Dopamine receptor signalling: intracellular pathways to behavior". In Neve KA. The Dopamine Receptors. Springer. pp. 137–174. ISBN 1-60327-333-6.
> 7 votes

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Tags: neuroscience
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title: Can humans be reduced to a function?

text:
# Question
Title: Can humans be reduced to a function?
Based on an article by UK Essays, we are nothing more than robots that operate based on our past experience and other factors like amount of neurotransmitters, hormones, and other chemicals, trying to get optimal outcomes for ourselves.

Does this mean that every human mind can be reduced to (a very complex and nonperfect) function?

# Answer
> 6 votes
I think the key concept to tackle this question is to consider the concept of abstraction.

Abstract models are generalized models of some kind "reality" that we are interested in, with the aim to describe some behavior of the system in question reasonably well. Often the abstraction should also be relevant to many instances of the entity that we would like to describe: If you want a abstract model to describe a human, you would probably want it to be useful to describe many humans, and not just a specific human. This might provide less detailed predictive power for individuals, but might be more useful to apply to populations.

When talking about the world or the reality in any kind of descriptive way, we are really always using abstract models to think, rationalize and communicate about it.

Now for your question, of course you can make an abstract model of a human being, but you would have to ask yourself on what level of detail you want. Ignoring the practical difficulties in constructing this, we have to consider that the path to a model that matches "reality" as good as possible is endless. For example, for you to successfully model a brain, you would in the end not only have to describe every atom of the brain, but the quarks and maybe end up all the way in string theory. And in the same time capturing all the emergent behavior down this chain and not only being a reductionist.

Theoretically, I'd say that the answer to your question is definitely yes, it would be theoretically possible to make a abstract model for a human mind that has "good enough" predictive power.

Everything we know about the real world is deterministic (except for some uncertainties if we get down to quantum mechanics, that probably would not have any significant influence on a very high-level system like a brain anyway). There is no scientific support that imaginal non-deterministic things like "free will" either exists or have any practical influence, so there is nothing except the pure complexity of the matter, our knowledge and our scientific processes that sets the limits for how detailed we can describe something.

# Answer
> 6 votes
For a review of how this question is debated in Cognitive Science, search for Searle's Chinese Room Thought Experiment.

In the Chinese Room Thought Experiment, Searle argues **there is something fundamentally meaningful (semantic-holding-preserving) about the internal state of a living being**. Additionally, this meaning cannot be approximated by a computer. Consequently, **since this meaning cannot be approximated, the human being cannot be reduced to a function**. Any attempt at this will fail to approximate this "meaning" and be incomplete in some respect.

To justify this stance, he makes the analogy between a person in a room that receives commands through a door in Chinese. Although the person does not understand Chinese, thanks to reference books, he can give the appropriate response on a piece of paper and slip it back under the door. In the analogy, the reference books are the database of rules, the person is the program and the door is the input and output. Obviously the program (person) does not understand Chinese or anything about the meaning of the input and output. How can any computer program (or as you say in your question "function") be said to approximate the human mind if it doesn't understand anything?

There are many replies to this thought experiment. The most potent reply I've come across to this is the System's Reply, which claims that although the person does not understand Chinese, the system as a whole is what understands Chinese.

Searle replies to this argument by letting the man internalize the books and let him wander outside into China. Searle claims that the man will still not understand Chinese in any "meaningful" manner.

I don't find this reply convincing since, when you look at what "meaningful" means to Searle and where it comes from biologically, Searle justifies that there is something in the synapses that can't be captured by a computer. This is an ineffective argument since it can't be proven or disproven by measurement or experiment. Additionally, it is easily defeated by Pylyshyn's reductionist argument. Pylyshyn argues that according to Searle, if you individually replaced every synapse with an identically functioning silicon component, eventually you would cease to have meaningful thought, which seems absurd.

Personally, I would argue that Searle's counter-argument to the System's Reply is a limited metaphor. Give the person a chance to modify the books in their head as well as interact with Chinese in the wild and undoubtedly they will understand Chinese! That's literally how people learn language!

Although I have clearly chosen a side in this debate, it's far from settled, as most things remain in philosophy, but hopefully this gives you a good starting point.

# Answer
> 3 votes
The final two paragraphs of that piece address this exact question.

> Although understanding how neurons communicate with each other contributes to our understanding of behaviour at the level of biology, behaviour cannot be reduced to biological explanations.
>
> In conclusion, the communication of neurons within the nervous system assists our understanding of behaviour however, is not the only contributing factor. Reducing explanations of behaviour to a biological level suggests that we are all robots.

The article states that if we reduced human behavior to only biological factors we would essentially be robots, but that we can't reduce behavior to biology alone. So, we cannot be essentially robots.

If we could develop a way to hold all other factors same, than biology would work as a way to program humans.

# Answer
> 0 votes
I've recently became aware of the field of **Evolutionary Psychology** and read the book "Why beautiful people have more daughters" by Satoshi Kanazawa. It is quite enlightening - this new field suggests that humans have built-in psychological programs and preferences.

Kanazawa suggests - when looking for a potential mate in the african savanna, without the concept of age and calendar, the human **male brain** has evolved to prefer traits associated with high fertility and youth:

* **Long shiny hair** (disease causes hair to lose luster - evidence of health)
* **Waist to hip ratio** of ~0.7 (Indicates fertility and healthy hormone levels)
* **Big breasts** (larger breasts sag more with age - easier to guess age)
* **Blonde hair** (more of a northern European trait, where clothing obscures traits listed above, and teenagers lose blonde hair and turn brunette with age)
* **Blue eyes** (easier to see arousal via pupil dilation)

The factors above combine into the universal model of beauty, because youth maximizes reproductive success (younger woman can conceive easier and will give birth to more children than a woman in her 30s). The primitive brain effortlessly and unconsciously reads traits above as "attractive". Yet one will have hard time rationally explaining why they are attractive.

**To answer your question - I would say that these "lower order" cognitive processes can indeed be modeled like a robot or personal function.**

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Tags: cognitive-neuroscience, theoretical-neuroscience, mathematical-psychology, theory-of-mind
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# Question
Title: Why is Internet Addiction Disorder not listed in the DSM-5 manual?
Disclaimer - I am not a student of psychology.

I'm currently researching Internet Addiction Disorder and online games for a paper I'm writing. Is there an actual reason why it's not included? Is it because it's such a new area of study?

# Answer
There's debate over whether Internet addiction is it's own disorder or a symptom of an underlying psychosis. See this essay by the first man to publish the term: https://theconversation.com/is-internet-addiction-a-misnomer-55727
> 4 votes

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Tags: internet, addiction
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# Question
Title: What are the psychological differences in camelCase and underscore_case programming conventions?
In computer programming, spaces are often forbidden in the declaration of variable names, so programmers have created alternate methods of identifying word boundaries in variable names: camel case and underscores being two of the most popular.

variablesInCamelCaseLookLikeThis

variables\_in\_underscore\_case\_look\_like\_this

There's no shortage of debate about the superiority of one or the other on the internet, including within Stack Exchange, and on blogs approaching the question from a variety of perspectives, but like many questions in psychology there's probably no clear winner here. Instead, there are likely to be advantages and disadvantages of each approach.

What does the cognitive science literature say about the relative advantages and disadvantages of camel case and underscore case programming conventions?

# Answer
> 3 votes
As the author of the blog post you refer to, I can state that at the time of writing (early 2011) there were not too many studies reporting on this specific topic, which is why I reported on the single study I found at the time (Binkley et al. 2009). However, I advise you to read a follow-up study by a different group of researchers (Sharif and Maletic 2010). They address some of the shortcomings in the earlier study.

The common finding for both studies is that camelCasing is slower to read, which I summarized in a follow-up post:

> **No difference in accuracy** was reported (as opposed to Binkley et al.), but on average, **camel-cased identifiers took 932ms (20%) longer** than underscored identifiers, in line with the 13,5% longer as reported by Binkley et al. The eye tracking results also give some insight into visual effort. **Camel-cased identifiers require a higher average duration of fixations.**

Based on more general studies in cognitive science (Epelboim et al. 2009) (as I mentioned in the summary of the first study) this was to be expected:

> Natural language research in psychology found that replacing spaces with Latin letters, Greek letters or digits had a negative impact on reading. However, shaded boxes (similar to underscores) have **essentially no effect on reading times** or on recognition of individual words. Removing spaces altogether slows down reading 10-20%.

However, I haven't done any follow-up research on this, thus it would definitely be worthwhile to dig into more recent citations. The ones listed below should provide a suitable starting point to this end.

<sub> Binkley, D., Davis, M., Lawrie, D., & Morrell, C. (2009, May). To camelcase or under\_score. In Program Comprehension, 2009. ICPC'09. IEEE 17th International Conference on (pp. 158-167). IEEE. \[PDF\]
Sharif, B., & Maletic, J. I. (2010, June). An eye tracking study on camelcase and under\_score identifier styles. In Program Comprehension (ICPC), 2010 IEEE 18th International Conference on (pp. 196-205). IEEE. \[PDF\]
Epelboim, J., Booth, J. R., Ashkenazy, R., Taleghani, A., & Steinman, R. M. (1997). Fillers and spaces in text: The importance of word recognition during reading. Vision Research, 37(20), 2899-2914. </sub>

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, human-factors
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# Question
Title: what are the components of logical mathematical intelligence?
what are the components of logical mathematical intelligence? The logical mathematic intelligence is one among the multiple intelligences suggested by Howard Gardner. I require the components of the same to make a test to measure logical mathematical intelligence of my students.

# Answer
> 2 votes
This question may be too complex to answer specifically as there are several components that identify Logical-Mathematical intelligence.

In terms of behaviour high LMI people **need** things to explore and think about, and are often seen as manipulative and often seek new experiences or topic matter to discover. These people **love** to experiment, question, figure out and calculate and often excel in logical or mathematical topics (as the name implies).

Testing for this in isolation may prove to be difficult as question sets focusing on logical reasoning and mathematical prowess may be skewed due to several reasons, including insufficient education to master the mathematics and the fact that given time most people have the ability to respond to LMI based questions. Its is also very common that people may have a high L sub-component and a low M sub-component and vice-versa.

May I suggest a more holistic way of measuring MI in all it's facets, and then extracting the top LMI performers. There are a few commercial tests and testing bodies that can help you here.

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Tags: intelligence, test
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# Question
Title: What does the statement mean "50% of happiness is determined by genetics"?
I posted the question "Is 50% of a happiness determined by genetics?" on Skeptics but realize I don't fully understand the claim. What does it mean that 50% of happiness is determined by genetics?

Does it mean that each time a person is happy, 50% of the reason they are happy is because of genetics? How can that possibly make sense as happiness is a human construct so why wouldn't the genetic factor apply the same to other emotions like sadness?

Is an example of how genetics determines happiness, that someone is predisposed to liking chocolate, so if they're happy when eating chocolate cake, genetics is 50% of the reason they are happy? Is that the claim?

Does this mean that an unhappy person can't do that much to become happy?

EDIT: would it be correct to say a person can change their level of happiness by +/-50%? Is this what the claim is saying?

TL;DR does the statement mean a person has at most 50% control over how happy they are?

CBS New York reports on research presenting this claim.

# Answer
The statement 50% of happiness is determined by genetics is presumably talking about heritability estimates.

It is probably talking about the percentage of variance explained by genetics.

These estimates are commonly estimated using twin studies. For example, you administer a survey to people that ask a bunch of questions about how happy they feel. There are a variety of measures (e.g., life satisfaction measures, quality of life measures, measures of tendencies to experience positive and negative emotions). If you administer these measures to twins, some of which are fraternal and some of which are identical, you can compare the degree to which the overlap in happiness scores increases in the identical over the fraternal twins.

A wide range of theories of well-being suggest that most people are happy most of the time. There is also theory to suggest that a person's emotional tendencies (e.g., see neuroticism, extraversion, well-being, and so on) are quite stable over long periods of time (i.e., over many years). So this does suggest, that at the very least, it is unusual for someone's emotional tendency to change dramatically over time.
> 3 votes

# Answer
I can think of two ways this can work (though not sure of 50% or more or less): (1) The "environment" to support a happy mind would, among other things, constitute a healthy body. And a body being healthy does depend, among other things, on genetics. (2) The predisposition of an individual to feel happy, given a suitable stimulus might depend on genetics; probably some kind of "happiness" gene!
> -1 votes

# Answer
I think the idea is that genetics regulate neurochemistry and therefore daily mood.

For example--it's likely that some people naturally experience more pleasure due to the calibration of their dopamine and serotonin systems.

Habits of mind may also play a role, but almost certainly a smaller one than genetics do.
> -2 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, emotion, genetics
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# Question
Title: Do ALL decisions arouse cognitive dissonance?
I continue to see an oversimplification in the descriptions of the options available that arouse cognitive dissonance: some websites state that all decisions have positive and negative aspects that will lead to dissonance and some say that dissonance is aroused only when a decision is made between two equally desirable options.

In other words, do ALL decisions arouse cognitive dissonance? Or just the decisions made between options that are equally or near-equally desirable?

For example, if I were to choose between an Ivy league college or a SUNY school, I don't think I would very much regret going to the Ivy league school and not the other (or would I be reducing dissonance by telling myself that?). However, the website explaining cognitive dissonance simply labels these options as "colleges".

Also what if the decision making was something trivial (in my perceptions)? Do whimsical decisions arouse dissonance as well?

For example, if I had a very large sum of money and I was selecting between two equally desirable cars, and I could very easily afford both, would I still experience much dissonance?

# Answer
> 6 votes
Short answer: This is mostly a question about statistical significance.

Cognitive dissonance theory encompasses several different research paradigms. I believe this question is about the "free-choice" paradigm - the only one that involves decision-making. This paradigm is also sometimes referred to as "choice-induced dissonance", or "post-decisional attitude change" (though the latter may be a misnomer, as attitude change may happen during the decision-making process rather than after).

**Traditional view:**

In the original formulation of this paradigm by Brehm (1956):

> A second prediction, that dissonance and consequent attempts to reduce it would be greater, the more closely the alternatives approached equality, also received support.

That is, it was suggested that dissonance occurs in all decisions, but decisions arouse more dissonance the more difficult (closer) they are, and presumably less dissonance the easier (more distanced) they are. The problem with this formulation is that at some point, the dissonance induced by sufficiently easy decisions is so small as to fail to reach statistical significance (p-value), making it essentially impossible to test this aspect of the hypothesis.

In the first 50 years or so since the theory was proposed, much support has been found for dissonance aroused by difficult decisions (for reviews, see Cummings & Venkatesan, 1976; and Harmon-Jones & Mills, 1999). Numerous variables other than "closeness of alternatives" have been proposed to moderate dissonance, such as importance of the decision, relevance to self, how public the decision is, personality traits, etc - see Kenworthy et al (2011) for a review.

**Recent developments:**

Then, Chen and Risen (2010) called the entire paradigm into question by pointing out that it is subject to a statistical artifact (first noted in 2008) that could be responsible for many false-positive results. That is, statistically significant changes in preference may be even more difficult to induce in subjects than previously believed.

Researchers are currently in the process of replicating and reevaluating the body of work that this paradigm is based on, controlling for the statistical artifact. Unfortunately, any assessments made prior to this of the level of cognitive dissonance produced by decisions are likely overestimated:

> Using the free-choice paradigm, many social psychological studies have investigated the effect of moderating factors on choice-induced preference change ... (e.g., choice importance, choice reversibility, etc. ...) ... However, without a proper control condition, any argument about absolute preference change would not be warranted (i.e., it is unclear whether or not significant dissonance reduction occurred in each condition). ...
>
> The same argument applies to past studies comparing preference change between two groups of individuals with different personalities ... or different cultural backgrounds ...
>
> Data from Izuma et al. (2010) suggests that individual differences in preference changes, which are measured in the typical free-choice paradigm explain only about 28% of the total variance in true preference changes.

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Tags: social-psychology, decision-making, cognitive-dissonance
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# Question
Title: Where is motor skill function located within the brain?
Does the neural activity that correlates with motor skill function tend to be focused near or far from the outer surface of the brain, or both? And what about perception?

My deeper curiosity being: I'd conjecture that the first is either near the surface or both, given the ability of technology now to read input directly from the brain in order to move virtual objects.

# Answer
> 1 votes
Most brain-machine interfaces involving movement would be based on activity in primary motor cortex, which, as you said, is near the surface. Right next to that are is primary somatosensory cortex, which is the first cortical area where touch information is processed. It is also near the surface. Most of the neocortex is going to be near the surface, with some parts (gyri) closer than others (sulci).

The primary reason that there is more progress being made with reading **from** the brain as opposed to sending information **to** the brain is that we have very little understanding of how information is stored and processed in the brain, the *language of the brain*. What we do know is that we can record neural activity and feed it into some type of machine learning algorithm which then can interpret this activity to some degree. Note that the output of these models is usually very limited and their performance is far from perfect.

Going the other way is a lot more difficult, because we would need to be able to *speak the language* of the brain. You might think that you could just reverse the models somehow, but it's not that simple. The good news is that all of this research (brain machine interfaces, as well as all of the other basic science work being done) is slowly moving towards a better understanding of how the brain works to a level where we will someday be able to *speak the language*. I wouldn't be surprised if, in less than 10 years, we will be seeing neural implants being tested that communicate bidirectionally with the brain.

# Answer
> 0 votes
Motor neurons, i.e neurons from wich there emerge coherent and parallel signals to our body to move it in an orderly and coherent way, are situated in the upper cortex, wich can be activated by will, or artificial (in wich case the ones who do the controlling do actually the same, also by will, only not to move their own body, but someone´s other).

Considering perception, I know that smelling something doesn´t develop in the cortex, but seeing for sure. The neurons responsible for seeing are in the cortex in the back of your head. This region is divided by the so-called area´s V-1 to V-5, each with an own task. It possible that someone because of this sees only blackness but can nevertheless point out in wich direction an object moves. and some people can´t see the difference between a circle or a square.

The perception of feeling is also situated in the cortex on top of your head (I´m sure you know that deformed person that represents how the strength of the feeling if someone touches you; the person with the big lips).

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Tags: perception, neuroanatomy, motor, brain-computer-interface
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# Question
Title: Can neuron change from excitatory to inhibitory (and vice versa) over time?
According to this answer a neuron can release only specific type of neurotransmitters at the time, however, could it change over time? For example a neuron that now releases only inhibitory neurotransmitters, after a few days will turn into a neuron releasing only excitatory neurotransmitters. If it is possible, then what does it depend on (mathematical models appreciated)?

# Answer
As far as I know, it is not possible for a neuron to change which type of neurotransmitter it releases. However, it is the case that the neurotransmitter GABA changes from excitatory to inhibitory over the course of development. This is occurs because GABA activates Cl- (chloride) channels. The chloride concentration gradient across the cell membrane changes directions over development, so the direction of current caused by opening of Cl- channels also changes.

Nature Reviews Neuroscience 3, 728-739 (September 2002) | doi:10.1038/nrn920
**Excitatory actions of gaba during development: the nature of the nurture**
Yehezkel Ben-Ari
http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v3/n9/abs/nrn920.html
> 12 votes

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Tags: neuroscience, theoretical-neuroscience, neurophysiology
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# Question
Title: What makes people easily subscribe to pseudoscientific theories?
There are **many** theories/disciplines that have been categorized as pseudoscience in the scientific community.

The list includes many things that are regularly even quoted in media like graphology, astrology, psychoanalysis, personality types, etc.

### Questions:

* What attracts people to such theories? Do any cognitive biases make people believe them easily? Which part of pseudosciences acts as a stimulus that triggers this cognitive bias?
* If there's a cognitive bias behind people believing in pseudoscience, knowing that a majority of the population does that – is there any term for such a phenomenon in social psychology?
* A majority of the population believes in some kind of pseudoscience. Does this signify an evolutionary aspect of our minds – that people are still evolving into better species that might one day believe in proper science? Pseudoscience seems to be older than science; correct me if I am wrong here.

# Answer
There are two great TED talks that together help shed some light on your question:

1. David Deutsch (2005) "A new way to explain explanation", and
2. Richard Dawkins (2009) "Why the universe seems so strange"

At a fundamental level, science is about explanation (and *sometimes* using that explanation to make predictions). Thus, to most people, science is useless unless they understand the story it tells. The problem with modern science is that to have a good grasp of its explanatory power, you need a lot of (often difficult) background. As you gain this background, you develop what Feynman would call the most fundamental skill in science: always questioning, being able to say "I don't know", and to hold contrasting ideas together. If you don't invest in acquiring this background, most of science seems like witchcraft passed down by ivory-tower academics in funny gowns and hats.

What pseudoscience (or even cargo-cult science) provide is explanations that require less background, purport to be more certain, have something for everyone (Forer effect), and reassure you that "there is an answer". If you look at much of pseudoscience (or ancient myths) more closely, you will notice that they tend to personify their subject matter much more than science (my favorite example is the homunculus fallacy). They use this personification to provide agency, intent, and meaning to their explanations.

The great advantage of these human stories is that our minds are optimized for them. If you subscribe to Dunbar's Social Brain Hypothesis, then one of the main things evolution produced is a mind built to understand social structure, and other people. When an agent does not adhere to its role and violates our theory-of-mind and behaves erratically, without discernible intent and meaning, this is dangerous to us and our society; it causes us great discomfort. When you hijack the social mind to try to explain further and further afield parts of nature, you try to build the same sort of characters.

When you have to say "I don't know" or "I don't understand" this character, it creates discomfort. Pseudoscience thrives on this by giving an arbitrary, simple, shallow and easy to change explanation. Since most lay-people never pursue this explanation far enough to notice its contradictions, and since it shapes their observations (in the Popper-sense and through confirmation bias) they never get a strong enough cognitive-dissonance to overcome to positive feeling of having an understandable 'explanation'.

Unfortunately, all I can do in this answer is provide a intuitively appealing, intent and agency based explanation. Reread my answer and make note of unnecessary personifications I made -- just like much of pseudoscience, science is a story and there is the biggest rub.
> 70 votes

# Answer
There are now many full-length books that focus on this deep, complex question about human nature/psychology and note newer/ongoing/active research in the area, some of it cited in them.

But some counterpoint from the reverse, flip side. Science is a complex, evolving, and at times subtle field in a way that was not fully recognized largely until the research in Kuhnian shifts.
> 14 votes

# Answer
Perhaps people are attracted to these theories in part because of the inability for mainstream science to answer anomalies.

The occasion of governmental

* lying,
* hiding of technology, and
* corruption,

helps reinforce the idea that there exists real Science that is not known to the mainstream. In the absence of trust, people contemplate the possibilities (imagination) by which the breach of trust could harm them.
> 9 votes

# Answer
Taking Up John Berryman's challenge in the Comment to the Question:
Most people do not develop mentally past the Concrete Operations stage or early Formal Operations (Piaget). People with this (very common and normal) level of mental development do not reason well in abstract terms and cannot do advanced symbolic manipulations. They are prone to the many Cognitive Biases and other types of fallacy because **they cannot see how proper reasoning is different from the fallacies and biases.** (Indeed, if everyone could reason properly, the biases would not exist.)

So, like the common tendency to need glasses to see well, and the likelihood of having crooked teeth or getting cataracts, these are just normal situations that render many people unable to reason as needed to understand science. No amount of 'splaining' or 'edumication' will help.

People usually stop developing mentally when they finish school, unless they are unusually motivated to keep studying something out of interest or have very stimulating companions. (Note that this is not to say that anyone *cannot* develop farther mentally due to some sort of deficiency, merely that they *do not*, out of life choice and habit. So don't call me a bigot!)
> 3 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, social-psychology, motivation, bias, rationality
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# Question
Title: Why compare a target group to a control group when population norms are available?
I am reading now many studies about juvenile offending and delinquency, and there are always compared offenders´ results from different tests (for example personality, IQ) with control group. I am asking myself why, when there exist norms that are representative for normal population?

# Answer
Say your juvenile offender are on average 16 year old boys from Britain, and the control group consists of (on average) 16 year old British boys who haven't done anything wrong. The only difference between these groups are the fact one has a criminal record or not. If you would look at the true norm, you could be looking at the world wide norm of both boys and girls from both Britain and other countries that may or may not have a criminal record.

The control groups (and actual participants) are thus chosen (and tested) specifically to factor out unforeseen variability. Depending on the question authors want to answer, different control groups may be necessary.
> 5 votes

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Tags: measurement, methodology
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# Question
Title: What does the death of a fictional character mean?
> Aristotle approached the question of story and meaning in this way: Why is it, he asked, when we see a dead body in the street we have one reaction, but when we read of death in Homer, or see it in the theatre, we have another? ~ Robert McKee, *Story*

When a fictional character is killed, no one dies – and the readers and viewers know this, no matter how much they identify with the story. So what does this narrative device actually mean? Aristotle thought that the death of a character evokes emotions in the viewers that then allow the author to convince them of his narrative argument. He calls this "pathos". Following Aristoteles, the death of a character "means" that the audience becomes more susceptible to what the author wants them to believe (the moral of the story). But that is the author's perspective on what he can do with the death of a character, and does not explain how the audience experience and understand it.

To answer this question, we may have to first understand how the audience perceives the character.

> A character is no more a human being than the Venus of Milo is a real woman. A character is ... a metaphor for human nature. ~ Robert McKee, *Story*

A character is a symbol that stands in for something that affects the reader or viewer: their deams and aspirations; or their fears. And thus the death of a symbol may symbolize that a dream will remain unfulfilled or a fear is overcome. Death in the media, I believe, is not final but transformative, and not real but symbolic, and this becomes most apparent in the journey to the underworld (read "death") of many mystical heroes. But that is only my opinion.

Is there research that tries to answer this question from the perspective of psychology?

Or, in the absence of such research, how would *you* study it?

---

In his comment, Steven Jeuris remarks, that a fictional character's death means that he dies in the fictional world. Let me elaborate on that.

Readers of fiction don't read like news readers. A newspaper reader reads to learn what has happened in the world he lives in, and (maybe) to understand why. Because these events (and their reasons) affect his own life and the decisions he has to make.

Readers of fiction, on the other hand, do not read to be informed. They read to experience emotions, to escape their own lives, to be inspired, and so on. The facts of the fictional world are irrelevant to their own lives, but the emotions they elicit, the ideas they generate, and the time spent away from the demands of their own lives are important to them.

If a neighbor, politician or artist dies in the real world, and I read about it, this affects my own life. My life has been changed (because a person is missing from it) or it will be changed (because politics will change). If a fictional character dies, nothing changes in my life.

What is changed, is the *story*.

And story logic is not like the chains of cause and effect (or chance) that govern the events in real life. In the real world, many (if not most) people die through forces that lie outside of their influence. They die of old age or are run over by drunk drivers. In the fictional world, everything happens by design, and that design is based on the story's premise and the characters actions. In a fictional world, no one dies by chance, and even old age has a meaning.

Very simplified, in a (classic type of) story a character achieves his goals, if he overcomes his deficits. If he refuses to grow, he fails. Death is the reward for moral failure. Think of the hero killing his antagonist or the first two knights being eaten by the dragon: these characters don't just die and then they are dead, but their death means that their way of life was wrong.

But of course stories are usually more complicated than that today. Characters aren't simply good or bad, they are "realistic", like real people. And the world they inhabit isn't as simply structured as that of a fairy tale, it is "realistic", like the real world. In Game of Thrones, characters die apparently like in the real world: despite being the good guys.

But still, it is not the real world. If the good guy dies in Game of Thrones, it is **not** because Game of Thrones is realistic and characters in its world die just like people in real life, but because it is not what we are used to from narrative conventions and it surprises us. The death of the good guy in Game of Thrones means that we cannot trust what we have learned about how stories work. It does not mean that someone died. It is sad and frustrating, because we wanted Ned Stark to succeed, but at the same time it is thrilling and satisfying, because it is novel.

These are just examples, and there will be disagreement over the *interpretation* of these stories, but I hope they serve to illustrate that the death of a fictional character does **not** mean (**to the reader !**) that this "person" has died in the fictional world. It means something different or on top of that to the reader (who knows, which is important, that no one has died !).

Of course, every death in fiction might be interpreted differently – depending on the specific story. But I think that it must be possible to generalize and find an underlying similarity or several "types of fictional deaths".

Finally, I think that this question does not belong on another site, because the study of the psychology of reading books or viewing movies (that is, the psychology of the audience) is the task of the psychologist just like advertising psychology (which also deals with how stories work on their audience).

So if you want, think of my question of belonging in advertising psychology: Does the clean shirt the housewife pulls from the washing mashine mean that the shirt has been cleaned? No. It means that the washing powder is better than other washing powders (or, if you are a cynic, that that is what the advertiser wants us to believe). The meaning of the clean shirt depends on the intent of the narrator and the circumstances of the narration (in an ad).

Similarly, the meaning of a fictional death will depend on the (reader perceived) intent of the narrator (who, by the way, is not the author) and the circumstances of the narration (a book, a tv show). But I don't want to do a (subjective) literary interpretation (like I did here), but learn how this has been studied or, if no such studies have been undertaken, study it with psychological methodology.

Hope this now makes a bit more sense.

# Answer
> 7 votes
There are various reasons why this question is interesting for cognitive science research. Examples:

* Children's programming is more violent and features more death than adult programming. Children's first exposure to the concept of death is often in fiction. Nonetheless, we know little about the meaning of death of fictional characters to children.
* Research done in Somalia following the airing of a BBC radio show depicting the fictional death of a young girl from diarrhoea - one of the biggest killers of children - shows that listeners were greatly affected by the story, learned preventative measures, and put their knowledge into practice, potentially saving lives.
* Grief counsellors often report patients presenting the same symptoms for grief over a fictional character's death as that of a relative or friend. Furthermore, using the same therapy has similar effects on grieving for fictional loss as it does for real. As such, some counsellors advocate for treating such grief the same as the real thing, rather than something less serious.
* Fiction writers are also interested in this question for obvious reasons. For example, what makes Anna Karenina's death (considered one of the most tragic deaths in fictional history) so powerful to readers?

**Methodology**

The currently popular paradigm in psychology for testing the effect of fiction on subjects involves correlating exposure to fiction with various scales of social understanding and empathy:

* Subjects may be directly exposed to fictional material as part of the experiment (eg, asked to read a passage or view a clip), or their lifetime exposure to fiction may be estimated through self-reporting via the Author Recognition Test (ART), a validated task-based measure.
* The Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) can be used to measure subjects' tendency to become immersed and engaged in narrative.
* The most popular tools for measuring social skills and theory of mind are the Mind-in-the-Eyes task (MIE) or Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) - well known tests involving labelling mental states from pictures of eyes. Other tests of social aptitude are also commonly administered.
* Indexes of affect and emotion are also used to measure effects; eg, depression, stress, self-esteem, etc.

In neuroscience, researchers like to compare neuroimaging results of subjects exposed to fictional material, to results of exposure to corresponding real events. For example, how does the brain react to reading about an action compared to performing that action.

**Fiction vs non-fiction**

Evidence indeed supports your assertion that fiction has a different effect on readers than non-fiction. Far from an unrealistic, fake, or disengaging experience, a variety of different experiments suggest that subjects are more engaged (Appel & Maleckar, 2012; Goldstein, 2009), learn empathy and improve social skills (Djikic et al, 2013; Mar et al, 2006; Johnson, 2012; Bal & Veltkamp, 2013), and score better on Theory of Mind tests (Kidd & Castano, 2013), following exposure to fiction, than after exposure to non-fiction with the same content. There is even evidence that reading fiction may affect personality (Djikic et al, 2009).

In an experiment by Ebery and Meyvis (2014), subjects predicted that they would be more engaged and emotionally impacted by stories based in fact than fiction. The participants were then given a story to read about the death of a young girl. Though all participants read the same story, half were told it was based on true events, while the other half were told it was a fictional account. Contrary to their beliefs, actual results demonstrated that subjects were more engaged and emotionally impacted by the same story when told in advance that it was fictional.

Evidence of these effects of fiction has been replicated across various media formats, including film, and video games. There are also some notable exceptions: Television for instance, often has an inferior effect. Hypotheses suggested to account for this difference include lower quality content, and at least in children, television is also a less social affair compared to other media where parents are naturally more involved. There is also a difference in effect between literary fiction and popular fiction.

There are, similarly, different effects across genres (eg, comedy vs drama), presentation quality (eg, matching soundtrack), and continuity (eg, technical problems). Thus there are many factors that affect results, together constituting the overall engagement or immersion factor (sometimes referred to as "transportation" or "experience-taking"), that in turn affects the meaning of a fictional character to its audience.

**Mental states**

This is still a relatively immature area of research, so the usual caveats apply, as many variables have not been explored yet. For example, many of these results have not been tested across cultures, though there is some indication that personality is not a significant factor in results (Mar et al, 2009).

Already however, some high-level theories about the meaning of fictional characters have started to emerge. One such theory is fiction as simulation (eg, Mar & Oatley, 2008; Oatley,1999):

> fiction ... is simulation that runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers. ... in the simulations of fiction, personal truths can be explored that allow readers to experience emotions-their own emotions-and understand aspects of them that are obscure, in relation to contexts in which the emotions arise.

This view is supported by the learning effects of fiction on readers as reviewed above.

Rather than focusing on simulation, learning, and practice effects, an alternative approach emphasizes the similarity between the effects of literary events and real-life events (eg, Zwann, 2004). Support for this view comes from neuroimaging of subjects exposed to fictional content compared with subjects experiencing the real counterpart. Such studies show that the same areas of the brain are activated in both cases (Speer et al, 2009; de Vignemont & Singer, 2006; Mar, 2011), suggesting that the mental states involved are essentially the same.

What does this mean for the death of a fictional character? Well, if mental states evoked by fictional stories simulate or mirror mental states evoked by real-life events, then the death of a fictional character could have the same meaning as the death of a real-life person. The death of a favoured character in a television show may have the same effect as the death of a favourite celebrity; the death of a highly engaging fictional character in a book may have the same impact as that of a close friend or family member; and the death of a protagonist one identifies personally with in a story may be equivalent to coming to terms with one's own mortality.

# Answer
> 2 votes
I am not a psychologist. However, I am a writer, so I will try my best. When an author sets out to create a fictional work, he or she aims to immerse the reader in the world, to get the reader to care for the characters. All of this is done in order to leave an impression on the reader--an emotional connection established between the character and the reader makes a work of fiction that much more better.

When killing a character, an author is attempting to use the connection that the reader has with the character in order to produce emotions in the reader. In addition, the author may be aiming to support a major theme in the work. However, the death of a fictional character mainly serves to produce emotions in the reader, and give him/her a sense of resolution to the character.

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Tags: reading
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