# Question
Title: Is praying the Catholic rosary a meditation and does it enhance brain plasticity?
Futurism.com says that meditation can shape brains and increase brain plasticity and fit. Can we say that praying the Catholic rosary is a kind of meditation and does this prayer have all the benefits of meditation?

The common practice of the rosary is to say five decades a day each containing an *Our Father* and ten *Hail Marys* keeping one's place with a looped string of beads. All Catholics know these prayers by heart and can repeat them almost automatically, so thoughts are directed towards some inner prayer and talk with God during its recital.

Is this a kind of meditation and does it enhance brain plasticity?

# Answer
> 3 votes
There are TWO main categories of meditation \[*Reference: Lutz, A., Slagter, H. A., Dunne, J. D., & Davidson, R. J. (2008). Attention regulation and monitoring in meditation. Trends in Cognitive Science, 12, 163-169.*\]. One is ‘focused attention meditation’ and this meditation practice is mainly used to calm the mind (note that the mind has the habit of constantly roaming to all types of thoughts: this attribute is sometimes referred to as the “monkey mind”). Many religions have meditation practices that calm the mind – this practice (Rosary) would be an example.

The other type of meditation is referred to as ‘open monitoring meditation.’ Here, one is attentive moment by moment to anything that occurs in experience – this meditation is used to develop wisdom (this method is found in Buddhist teachings, where it is typically known as “vipassana”). Mindfulness meditation generally falls into this category, although mindfulness of breath is a calming meditation practice \[*Reference:Karunamuni, N. (2015). The Five-Aggregate Model of the Mind. SAGE Open, 5 (2)*\].

# Answer
> 8 votes
The accepted method of praying the Rosary is to actually complete five (5) decades, each containing the Hail Mary (Ave Maria) repeated 10 times (hence the term "decade"). Each decade is followed by an Our Father (Pater Noster), Gloria, and a Hail Holy Queen, and the announcement of the "mystery" to be meditated upon during the next decade. Each day has its own theme for meditations to be contemplated (there are three traditional sets of mysteries: The Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries, with Saint Pope John Paul II adding a fourth set, the Luminus Mysteries). The Rosary has a set of introductory prayers, and a closing prayer. A "Full" rosary, though not often completed by the lay, is a full set including all of the Mysteries, and one can purchase a "complete" Rosary consisting of 15 groups of 10 beads, versus the standard 5 found on most Rosaries.

According to a study published in the British Medical Journal (2001;323:1446-1449), researcher Dr. Luciano Bernardi, associate professor of internal medicine at the University of Pavia in Italy and his team tested whether rhythmic chanting, in this case reciting the rosary or using Yoga mantras, could have a favorable effect on the heart’s rhythms. What the team knew at the beginning of the study was that slow regular breathing was beneficial in preventing heart disease by synchronizing inherent cardiovascular rhythms.

Using 23 healthy adults whose heart rate and blood pressure were measured prior to the start of the study, the researchers measured their breathing rates while some participants prayed the rosary in the original Latin (Ave Maria), and others recited a given Yoga mantra. For comparison, the study participants’ breathing rates were measured during free talking and during slow breathing exercises also. What they noted is that the participants rate of breathing slowed down from fourteen breaths a minute (spontaneously) to 8 breaths per minute when they engaged in regular conversation, but breathing slowed down even more to six breaths per minute while reciting the rosary or the yoga mantra. Breathing at a slow six breaths per minute “has generally favorable effects on cardiovascular and respiratory function,’’ the researchers note. What’s more, the researchers found reciting the rosary or the yoga mantra both similarly synchronized all the hearts rhythms.

It ends up that despite the cultural differences between the two spiritual practices, rosary chants and yoga mantras, Dr. Bernardi suggests that the two may have similar origins and both evolved as a simple way to slow respiration, improve concentration, and induce calm. The rosary while known to be related to the Catholic religion, was initially introduced by the Crusaders “who learnt a similar technique from the Arabs who in turn learned it from the Indian and Tibetan masters of yoga”, Dr. Bernardi states.

---
Tags: cognitive-neuroscience, meditation
---


# Question
Title: Why are some of us attracted to certain women while others are not
Earlier, I was having a discussion with my co-worker. We were talking about the hottest women in Hollywood and we had some different opinions. My co-worker thought that Angelina Jolie was one of the hottest women to walk the planet where-as I never even thought she was pretty.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure Angelina Jolie is perfectly fine, I’ve just never found her very attractive.

I’ve been pondering this question for awhile. What are the psychological differences between us men that cause us to be attracted to different types of women?

# Answer
> I've been pondering this question for awhile. What are the psychological differences between us men that cause us to be attracted to different types of women.

I assume that neither of you actually knows that woman, so the only "type" of person she could be to either of you is an actress (along with her other attributes: mother of 6 children, special envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), humanitarian, etc.).

People often put someone on a pedestal for various reasons, and redefine their preferences later.

Perhaps she has done something that your friend admires and that increases his opinion of her, while doing nothing to actually increase her attractiveness.

This article: "10 Highly Attractive Traits In Women (That Have Nothing to Do With Looks)" (which is hardly a definitive and reliable source) explains a few things that are probably relevant to an answer: kindness, positivity and sense of humour, passionate about her pursuits, confidence, emotional responsibility, decisiveness, her own sense of style, gentleness - not that you've seen her on her 'bad days', it's really a matter of perception.

Wikipedia (another non-expert) has a well thought out webpage and a section on female attractiveness. It lists Jessica Alba as proportional to the most attractive features:

> "A study by the University of Toronto found that specific ratios in the female human face correlated with attractiveness. The distance from pupil to pupil was 46% of the distance of the width of the face (from inside edge of ear to inside edge of ear). The distance between midpoint of eyes to midpoint of mouth was 36% of the length of the face from the chin to the hairline. Researchers found that ideal measurements, in proportion to the overall size of the face, were close to the average of all female profiles.".

The website MorphThing has closeups of each of them, and a mock-up of their faces combined:

If you're friend comes back with, "Oh yeah, I didn't mean Angelina Jolie, I meant Jessica Alba" - well that's another thing that happens. I know females whom are better looking than either of them, not as accomplished but 'better looking'.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Both of them are 40 and have a few children from other men, so I'm going to pass. I know females whom appear quite beautiful but make a lot of mistakes, covering for them wouldn't be worth the trouble.

I agree with you that your friend could have picked someone else. The wikipedia link provides many links to various studies as well as mentioning that beyond 'general traits' that opinions differ in different parts of the world.

This question is older than Aphrodite of Milos and Aphrodite of Knidos. So the answer is not "opinion based" the best explanation seems to be that the layperson seems to believe that they can look at facial features and body appearance, from that they can make a judgment about fertility; that being the deciding factor based on genetic selection. I (we) believe that some people are not so skillful as others.
> 2 votes

---
Tags: social-psychology, personality
---


# Question
Title: Does the number of alternatives in a multiple choice question affect the learning output?
I have built several apps in Norwegian about hunting, philosophy etc. Students use the app to learn a subject and test their knowledge before doing their exam. In current state i have one question with three alternatives, where one is correct. The student will be presented with the solution to the question after they have chosen the alternative, and not on the end of the test.

For example:

What is the the capital city of Australia?

1. Canberra
2. Sydney
3. Melbourne

I was wondering if anyone know if there is any research on if students learn more/less/equal by being presented with 4 alternatives instead of three.

For example:

What is the the capital city of Australia?

1. Canberra
2. Sydney
3. Melbourne
4. Edmunton

Does this have any effect for learning, since it's less probable to just check the correct by chance. Maybe students have to do more active thinking since it's more alternatives to think about, and therefore learn more?

# Answer
I doubt this has been studies as you ask, i.e. effect on learning. Most of the literature seems to hammer/contrast the effects on learning of multiple-choice vs constructed-response exams, e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3433302/

There have been more limited investigations of 3 vs 4/5 choice in tests. One meta-analysis from 2005 titled "Three Options Are Optimal for Multiple-Choice Items: A Meta-Analysis of 80 Years of Research"

> Multiple‐choice items are a mainstay of achievement testing. The need to adequately cover the content domain to certify achievement proficiency by producing meaningful precise scores requires many high‐quality items. More 3‐option items can be administered than 4‐ or 5‐option items per testing time while improving content coverage, without detrimental effects on psychometric quality of test scores. Researchers have endorsed 3‐option items for over 80 years with empirical evidence—the results of which have been synthesized in an effort to unify this endorsement and encourage its adoption.

This meta-analysis has about 300 citations in Google Scholar, so at least people took notice. I don't know how well received its conclusions were. Wikipedia's page Multiple choice doesn't even mention this paper, but the page is rather sparse in citations anyway.

I did find one newer study 2010 (citing the meta-analysis), which confirmed its conclusions:

> Overall, three-option items perform equally as well as four-option items. Since three-option items require less time to develop and administer and additional options provide no psychometric advantage, teachers are encouraged to adopt three-option items as the standard on multiple-choice tests.

And another one from 2009, roughly confirming it:

> The low frequency of items with three functioning distractors in the four-option items in this study suggests that teachers have difficulty developing plausible distractors for most MCQs. Test items should consist of as many options as is feasible given the item content and the number of plausible distractors; in most cases this would be three. Item analysis results can be used to identify and remove non-functioning distractors from MCQs that have been used in previous tests.

In these papers, the reason why 3-item MC tests are often just as good has mostly to do with who makes the exam (and the time spend developing it) rather than than who takes it.

On the other hand, there's a 2012 paper on listening tests (evaluated with MCs), which somewhat disagrees:

> Mean test scores of the three-option tests were significantly higher than those of four- and five-option tests. While no difference was found in mean item discriminations across the three different test formats, reliability coefficients showed inconsistent patterns depending on the number of options and test versions. One possible interpretation of the low correlations among the scores of three test formats is that items with different numbers of options tap into skills other than listening. The findings suggest that statistically, three options may or may not be optimal depending on the point of view taken – from that of the test score users, or from that of the test stakeholders. Test developers must consider multiple statistical, affective, and contextual factors in determining the optimal number of options.

This was supposedly a high-stakes exam, according to the paper title, namely the CSAT. Of the post-2005 papers, this last one has the most substantial literature and arguments review, so it's worth reading its first 4-5 pages.
> 3 votes

---
Tags: learning
---


title: Where is hatred born inside our brains?

text:
# Question
Title: Where is hatred born inside our brains?
I don't think anyone is born to hate.

I believe people learn to hate by the direct effect of the environment.

I want to know where exactly inside one's brain this hatred emerges and affects a person?

# Answer
From fMRI study, "Neural Correlates of Hate"

> Viewing a hated face resulted in increased activity in the medial frontal gyrus, right putamen, bilaterally in premotor cortex, in the frontal pole and bilaterally in the medial insula. We also found three areas where activation correlated linearly with the declared level of hatred, the right insula, right premotor cortex and the right fronto-medial gyrus. One area of deactivation was found in the right superior frontal gyrus. The study thus shows that there is a unique pattern of activity in the brain in the context of hate. Though distinct from the pattern of activity that correlates with romantic love, this pattern nevertheless shares two areas with the latter, namely the putamen and the insula.

This is only a study in which hated faces were seen, so really it measures more than merely were hatred "is born", or it might not even catch that at all. It's not too clear how one could find that out.

Another paper has it more concisely as

> the so-called ‘hate circuit' involving the superior frontal gyrus, insula and putamen

What's interesting in this latter paper is that this circuit was apparently "uncoupled" by depression.

Although it's veering off-topic, the authors of the latter paper have offered a less techincal interpretatoin of their finding in the mass media

> "We were a bit shocked when we first saw these results," says lead researcher Jianfeng Feng, a professor of computer science at the University of Warwick who specializes in biology. Feelings of self-hatred are a common feature of depression, he explains, so one would expect those feelings to also be more intense when directed toward other people.
>
> Instead, it's as if the brains of depressed people hate incorrectly. The brain disruptions the researchers observed could be a sign that people with depression have an impaired ability to cope with -- and learn from -- social situations in which they feel hate, Feng says. This may explain why they often turn emotions such as hatred and anger inward, instead of handling them in more constructive ways, he adds.

The thing to keep in mind that the "hate circuit" was labelled so after a narrow task (viewing hated images), which might not cover all the ways humans can hate. If the studies on love (which are more numerous) are a good analogy, "different types of love involve distinct cerebral networks, including those for higher cognitive functions such as social cognition and bodily self-representation". Although surely interesting, this line of research (on hate) is pretty much in its infancy (in my opinion).

Also, one cannot be certain a brain area is *necessary* for a certain function (say hate) just from brain imaging. One needs to "mess" with the brain area in question, which is usually unethical, except in rare cases, e.g. epilepsy patients who have had electrodes implanted. (I suggest you watch Kanwisher TED talk on this for more explanations.) In the case of the "hate circuit" no such evidence has been found yet, and history of neuroscience shows that it can take a really long time to have a confirmation like that for any association found by immaging.
> 1 votes

---
Tags: emotion, psychology
---


# Question
Title: What do brain waves look like under the influence of psilocybin?
I am curious about what brain waves (EEG) look like under the influence of psilocybin mushrooms or LSD. Is there any research on subjects in psychedelic states and how their brain waves change relative to normal?

# Answer
Best start here: The entropic brain: a theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs (2014). And then here is some more current literature worth exploring: Neural correlates of the psychedelic state as determined by fMRI studies with psilocybin (2012). Additionally:

Broadband Cortical Desynchronization Underlies the Human Psychedelic State (2013):

> Psilocybin reduced spontaneous cortical oscillatory power from 1 to 50 Hz in posterior association cortices, and from 8 to 100 Hz in frontal association cortices. Large decreases in oscillatory power were seen in areas of the default-mode network. Independent component analysis was used to identify a number of resting-state networks, and activity in these was similarly decreased after psilocybin. Psilocybin had no effect on low-level visually induced and motor-induced gamma-band oscillations, suggesting that some basic elements of oscillatory brain activity are relatively preserved during the psychedelic experience.

Connectome-harmonic decomposition of human brain activity reveals dynamical repertoire re-organization under LSD (2017):

> ... Fig. 2h demonstrating the energy difference between LSD and PCB \[placebo\] conditions ... For both effects, increased energy of high frequencies and decreased energy of low frequencies, the differences between each pair of conditions were found to be significant (p \< 0.01 ...). ... Taken together, our results reveal that LSD increases the total energy of brain activity and expands the repertoire of active brain states by significantly increasing the activity of high frequency brain states.
> 10 votes

---
Tags: neuroscience, eeg, brain-waves, psychedelics
---


# Question
Title: Generating a factor score for additional data using R and factanal
Using this simple R code, I have performed a factor analysis on my dataset:

```
factanal(df, factors = 6, scores = "regression", rotation = "varimax")

```

I have now found significant factors that I want to keep. I also have chosen to generate scores using the "regression" argument. I'm still not clear on all the steps `factanal` uses to provide the scores, but after some digging, I found that the "regression" argument does use what is known as Thomson's regression to generate some score. That score then seems to be turned into a z-score given all the scores.

So here is the question: Let's say that some new data comes in and I want to be able to give it a score as well. This new data happens to be one individual sample (the equivalent of one row of a new dataset).

Is there a proper way to give an individual sample a score or must the scores be generated on a population basis?

# Answer
> 2 votes
I wrote the following function that takes the fit object returned by `factanal` and new data that you provide (e.g., a data frame or matrix with identical variable names), along with the original data.

```
score_new_data <- function(fit, new_data, original_data) {
    means <- sapply(original_data[,row.names(fit$correlation)], mean)
    sds <- sapply(original_data[,row.names(fit$correlation)], sd)
    z <- as.matrix(scale(new_data[,row.names(fit$correlation)],
                         center = means,
                        scale = sds))
    z %*% solve(fit$correlation, fit$loadings)
}

```

So for example,

```
bfi <- na.omit(bfi)
variables <- c("A1", "A2", "A3", "A4", "C1", "C2", "C3", "C4")
data <- bfi[,variables]
fit <- factanal(data, factors = 2, scores = "regression", rotation = "varimax")

```

This is a typical factor analysis.

And now supply some new data along with the fit of the factor analysis and the original data:

```
 score_new_data(fit, data[1:5, ], data)

```

And it generates the following:

```
> score_new_data(fit, data[1:5, ], data)
         Factor1    Factor2
61623  1.4937101  0.1714941
61629 -0.8927227 -1.7240081
61634 -0.4091523 -0.1982590
61640  0.4855813 -1.1968676
61661 -1.2631737  0.6817574

```

The answer here provides additional details: https://stackoverflow.com/a/4146131/180892

If you look at the code for `factanal` you can also learn more about what the regression method of scoring involves:

```
  Lambda <- fit$loadings # lambda are the loadings
  zz <- scale(z, TRUE, TRUE) # matrix of data is z standardized
  # cv is correlation matrix
  sc <- zz %*% solve(cv, Lambda)

```

---
Tags: regression
---


# Question
Title: Survey questions to test competitiveness
I'm running an experiment and am suspecting that competitive people may respond differently to experimental treatments compared to non-competitive people.

To determine whether a person has a competitive personality, I'm thinking of surveying and asking questions such as

"My friends would describe me as a competitive person."

"I would describe myself as a competitive person."

"Even when there is no monetary reward, I will seek to surpass others when doing a task."

Would these be good measures of competitiveness? What other questions could I use?

# Answer
It's probably better to see if any validated indexes/tests exist, and some do e.g. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0013164492052002016

> Despite its relevance to a wide variety of situations, competitiveness is a personality characteristic that has not been widely studied. Although some research in need for achievement, sports psychology, experimental social psychology, and personality assessment has approached the topic of competitiveness, few studies have provided a clear definition of the construct or a psychometrically-sound way of measuring it. This paper clarifies the conceptual definition of competitiveness and introduces a 20-item scale called the Competitiveness Index. Study 1 focuses on the validity and reliability of the measure; Study 2 reports the results of an exploratory factor analysis of the Competitiveness Index which yielded three factors: (a) Emotion, (b) Argument, and (c) Games.

But it's 1990's paper with only ~100 citations or so, so not a blockbuster. You should also look at which papers cite it, to see if anything better has been developed.

Also I found a follow-up/companion paper by same reserch group, published nearly at the same time as the previous paper (this one has fewer citations) https://doi.org/10.1016/0191-8869(92)90030-S

> Little research has been devoted to the study of competitiveness as a personality trait. The Competitiveness Index (CI), developed by Smither and Houston (in press, Educational and Psychological Measurement), is a 20-item structured personality instrument that responds to this problem. This study explored the validity of the CI by investigating both the internal and external validity of the measure. The CI was completed by 255 subjects (158 nurses and 97 attorneys). A confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to assess the stability of the CI's factor structure across different population samples. In addition, a logistic discriminant analysis was performed to evaluate the CI's ability to differentiate between individuals in a competitive occupation (attorney) and a less competitive occupation (staff nurse). The results provide support for both the internal and external validity of the CI. The findings from the confirmatory factor analysis indicate that the factor structure of the CI is consistent across different population samples. The results of the discriminant analysis demonstrate that the CI can differentiate between individuals in more and less competitive occupations. Future research directions and possible applications of the CI are discussed.

And if need something briefer, a much more recent paper (2012) citing the previously mentioned work did this:

> Competitiveness. To measure competitiveness, we modified the competitiveness index scale suggested by Houston and colleagues (see Houston, Farese, & La Du, 1992; Smither & Houston, 1992) so that we could capture state competitive mindset. The scale included the following items: 1) Right now, I think that competing against an opponent would be enjoyable and 2) Right now, I think that keeping score is important when playing games. The two items were correlated at r=.73, p\<.001, which corresponds to $\alpha$=.84 (M=4.95, SD=1.42).
> 4 votes

# Answer
Good answer above by Fizz.

Also, consider what other well-studied traits are similar. Here's a long list: http://www.sjdm.org/dmidi/All\_Scales.html

It sounds to me like some items from the Big Five could overlap. For example, in these facets (each would have multiple items):

> Extraversion: Assertiveness (forceful), Activity (energetic), Excitement-seeking (adventurous)
>
> Conscientiousness: Dutifulness (not careless), Achievement striving (thorough)

and the opposite of this one:

> Agreeableness: Modesty (not showing off)

see http://fetzer.org/sites/default/files/images/stories/pdf/selfmeasures/Personality-BigFiveInventory.pdf

Also see a different taxonomy called the HEXACO, which has a whole trait called Honesty-Humility (presumably, you want to track scored on the Humility part)

> hexaco.org/
> 2 votes

---
Tags: measurement, survey
---


title: My Mind Shows Me My Future

text:
# Question
Title: My Mind Shows Me My Future
When I sleep, I can see some phenomenon as a dream. After some days or months or years that phenomenon happens in my life and forthwith my mind reminds me of that earlier dream that I saw. There are simple things such as for example getting down `pen from my hand` like wise.

My problem is how can this happen? I have heard this happens to others also. What kind of situation is this in the mind? Is it normal or abnormal?

# Answer
> 4 votes
It's a phenomenon called déjà rêvé, the French for "already dreamed":

> If you've ever felt like you predicted something in a dream, you might have felt it wise to keep that feeling to yourself so that others don't think you're as out-there as an ancient oracle. Well, good news: you don't need to be so secretive about your psychic dreams. They're actually a well-documented phenomenon called déjà rêvé — but they don't actually mean you can see the future. \[...\]
>
> According to a new study that looked back on the medical reports of epileptic patients from 1958 to 2015, déjà rêvé experiences are common after electric brain stimulation, a pretty standard treatment method for epileptic symptoms. It suggests that the "already dreamed" feeling is the result of something happening physiologically in the brain, and that in turn could point to a better understanding of how dreams work. \[...\]
>
> If you experience déjà rêvé, take comfort in knowing that it's totally normal — the feeling is just a harmless quirk of your brain.

And there's is actually a 2017 paper, on the occurrence in the general population; it looks like it happens to most peple at least some times:

> Deja reve ('already dreamed') has been hypothesized as a cause for various forms of déjà experience. With deja reve one has the distinct impression that the uncanny familiarity one is sensing has come from a preceding dream, but one not usually remembered until the experience is taking place. In this exploratory investigation, 2,492 respondents filled out online questionnaires in which they were queried about the incidence of their deja reve experiences, about dream frequency, and about their attitudes to dreams. The Big Five personality factors were also measured using a separate, standardized questionnaire. **Nearly 80% claimed to have had such experiences** and the associated frequencies are presented. Age was negatively correlated with the incidence and there was little gender dependence. The results of the Big Five personality factors are also presented.

Studies of déjà rêvé aren't very numerous however. The "new study" mentioned in that first popsci article distinguishes déjà-rêvé from déjà vu (basically déjà-rêvé elicits some specific dream/memory content, not mere impression of having seen something before) and proposes a further sub-classification:

> Déjà-rêvé appears to be different from déjà-vu—the two must not be confused. By construction, all déjà-rêvé episodes we collected had content, which is not the case for déjà-vu. Furthermore, déjà-vu and déjà-rêvé never involved the same bipolar contacts in the instances when both could be induced by EBS \[electric brain stimulation\] in the same patient. These results are critical since they support the idea that déjà-rêvé is a true phenomenon, different from déjà-vu.
>
> Moreover, déjà-rêvé is a generic term for distinct entities: recollection of a specific and detailed dream similar to an episodic memory, reminiscence of a vague dream or elements of dream(s) which feels familiar, and finally experiences that resemble or feel like what happens during dreams. Explicit content with mental imagery referring to a previous dream exists in the first two types, but the exactness of the details and contextual elements vary. In the third type, the content of the experience is not at the foreground, but the subject has the feeling of a known sensation or a state of consciousness similar to night dreaming. Only the first two types should be called déjà-rêvé, while the last type should be referred to as “dreamy state”.

They also discuss why déjà-rêvé is apparently not simply a hallucination, basically because of the association of the phenomenon with electrode placement in memory- and dream-related brain regions:

> It may be disputed that we cannot be sure that déjà-rêvé (episodic-like or familiarity-like) are linked to true previous dreams. EBS could simply produce a random combination of visual and auditory elements, creating phantasmagoric and unrealistic experiences similar to dreams. However, EBS-inducing déjà-rêvé were all located in the temporal lobes, although extratemporal brain areas were commonly stimulated \[4\]. They were also exclusively induced by medial temporal lobe EBS in our database. Thus, like other subtypes of experiential phenomena, specific locations of EBS seem to correlate with déjà-rêvé subtypes. This suggests it is improbable the déjà-rêvé we reported here are pure hallucinations, otherwise patients would have reported similar phenomena after stimulation of other brain areas. Furthermore, the brain regions implicated in déjà-rêvé include structures involved in long-term memory (especially in episodic memory and familiarity processes) \[27, 28, 29\], in memory formation during sleep \[29\], in normal dreaming \[30,31\] and probably in dream recall \[32\].

---
Tags: dreams
---


title: How is the brain cooled?

text:
# Question
Title: How is the brain cooled?
I remember\[ed\] reading a story on a brain-inspired integrated mechanism for energy-delivery and cooling in (experimental) new computer chips:

> The human brain packs phenomenal computing power into a tiny space and uses only 20 watts of energy - an efficiency IBM is keen to match.
>
> Its new "redox flow" system pumps an electrolyte "blood" through a computer, carrying power in and taking heat out. \[...\]
>
> "The human brain is 10,000 times more dense and efficient than any computer today.
>
> "That's possible because it uses only one - extremely efficient - network of capillaries and blood vessels to transport heat and energy - all at the same time."

But as with other biology-inspired stuff, neural networks in particular, what ultimately becomes useful in computer science/engineering may not be that closely related to the way biology actually works.

So what I want to ask here is: are there some detailed mass-and-heat flow analyses for how the brain (of humans or even of other mammals) is actually cooled? How is most of the heat exhausted from the brain? Is it really thorough blood, and then globally through the whole body? Or is mostly a more local process at head level?

---

I managed to find something about the importance of blood for cooling, but only at whole-body level:

> The second influence of the blood flow is that it can enhance heat dissipation from the inside of the body to the environment to maintain a normal body temperature. Theoretical study has shown that if the heat produced in the central areas of the body at rest condition could escape only by tissue conduction, the body temperature would not reach a steady state until it was about 80°C. A lethal temperature would be reached in only 3 hours. During exercise, our body temperature would have typically risen 12°C in 1 hour if no heat were lost by blood flow. Maintaining a core temperature of 37°C during thermal stress or exercise in the body is achieved by increasing the cardiac output by central and local thermoregulation, redistributing heat via the blood flow from the muscle tissue to the skin, and speeding the heat loss to the environment by evaporation of sweat.

So from that I suspect blood is surely important for cooling the brain as well, but still some questions remain, e.g. where does most of the heat from the brain get dumped by the blood? In more layman's terms: is the rest of the body necessary as a radiator for the brain, or is the skull enough for that purpose?

---

Thanks to a paper cited by AliceD on biology.SE, I also found some anatomical considerations from about two decades ago... which seem to not be very conclusive:

> Selective brain cooling (SBC) is understood as a natural mechanism that enables mammals to maintain their brain temperature below the temperature of the rest of the body during states of hyperthermia (Baker 1979). \[...\]
>
> The question whether SBC also operates in humans, who lack cranial retia mirabilia, has led to an interesting controversy. For some authors (Brengelmann 1987) the copious and constant arterial blood flow to the brain appears sufficient to cool the brain under all conditions. Others (Cabanac 1993) concede that this concept may be correct for the conditions at normothermia, but they propose that an additional brain-directed cooling mechanism becomes effective during hyperthermia. These authors draw attention to vascular arrangements in humans, which permit effects comparable to SBC in "rete species". Cabanac (1993) points to several sites of intimate thermal contact between the arterial and the cooler venous blood, e.g., the internal carotid in the carotid canal, where the artery is tightly surrounded by the venous plexus caroticus and thereafter immersed in the cavernous sinus, and the vertebral arteries surrounded by a plexus of veins where they course through the transverse foramina (see our Fig. 14). Furthermore, Cabanac refers to the high cooling capacity of the skin of the head (particularly rich in sweat glands), whence venous blood, cooled by sweat evaporation, flows via emissary veins towards the brain in hyperthermic situations (Caputa et al. 1978; Cabanac and Brinnel 1985; Deklunder et al. 1991; Hiroshita et al. 1991). An additional loss of heat occurs in the upper airways (Cabanac 1993), including the paranasal sinuses. A direct conductive skin-brain heat exchange has also been considered.

A decade-later paper by Caputa still noted that

> The existence of effective SBC in humans has not been proven directly because brain temperature has never been recorded in healthy subjects exposed to hyperthermic conditions.

# Answer
In my conclusion (so far):

Blood flow is important for cooling the brain (as well as the core of the body). One review says:

> \[Cerebral blood flow\] CBF is most critical for maintaining and stabilizing the thermal environment of the brain. Under normal conditions, cerebral tissue beyond 2–3 cm from the cortical surface remains unaffected by changes in ambient temperature surface without simultaneous temperature changes in the perfusing blood (Stone et al., 1997). Core brain temperature is generally higher than body temperature; with blood temperature in the jugular vein higher than in the carotid artery (Nunneley and Nelson, 1994), CBF primarily contributes to heat removal from brain tissue. The superficial parts of the brain, however, are much more susceptible to the ambient temperature and may be cooler than arterial blood, particularly in neonates and infants (Iwata et al., 2014). Primate studies demonstrated that shifts in temperature, 5–7°C on either side of the neutral zone (28 and 32°C), did not affect deep brain structures, while superficial sites and CSF of the basal subarachnoid space were reported to change (Hayward and Baker, 1968). CBF, therefore, is critical in maintaining intracranial thermal homeostasis by reducing temperature in the deep brain but sometimes increasing temperature in the superficial brain (Iwata et al., 2014).

Frankly I'm surprised that apparently no paper has tried to estimate the amount of heat removed from the skull just by the jugular vein, since there's a difference in temperature with the carotid artery, and the blood flow is known as well. This could be a decent first-order approximation of how much the rest of the body acts as a radiator for the head. On the other hand, there's something else that has been studied intensely...

In many non-human mammals and birds there's evidence for a mechanism that allows the brain to be cooler than the rest of the body. This mechanism, called SBC (selective brain cooling) has actually several flavors, but all seems to involve just head-level "radiators" like the nose.

There was no direct evidence (as of 2004) that SBC exists/works in humans, although some speculation based exist based anatomical considerations... as well as experimental analogy with extreme body temperatures observed across species:

> Actually, artiodactyls, which have the most effective mechanism of SBC, are able to tolerate extremely high body temperatures. Taylor (1970) has shown that heat stressed and water deprived Grant’s gazelles are able to maintain rectal temperature at 46.5C for as much as 6 h with no observable ill effects. Surprisingly, rectal temperatures as high as 46.5C (Khogali and Mustafa, 1984) and 47.0C (Hart et al., 1982) have been recorded also in humans who survived heat stroke. If SBC were absent, such high temperatures would be inevitably lethal.

All SBC info from above and images from

Until 2-3 years it seems there was no way to measure/image brain temperature in a similar way to how blood flow is. But that has changed with the introduction or MR thermometry, which is non-invasive method. One of the recent papers on this notes:

> Brain thermoregulation remains an enigmatic process reflecting the complex interplay of metabolism and cerebrovascular perfusion.

Although not trying to answer systemic "where the heat goes" questions, the paper has some interesting findings, namely that after a stroke brain temperature (in monkeys) raises above systemic temperature. That finding raises more questions than it answers with respect to brain thermoregulation mechanisms, but here is the eye candy of MR thermoimaging:

The paper goes into some detail into hypotheses of why this raise happens, how much it contributes to stroke propagation etc., but there aren't any firm answers. What is clear is that the brain can lose its ability to thermoregulate, relative to the body.
> 6 votes

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Tags: neuroscience
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# Question
Title: Is the placebo effect a form of cognitive bias?
Recently I’ve been trying to get a better understanding for the cause and mechanism of the placebo effect. A friend suggested that the placebo effect is a form of cognitive bias, but I’ve had trouble finding evidence for this.

# Answer
> 1 votes
The question is not terribly clear since it can be just an issue of categorizing the placebo effect in a philosophical sense as a "cognitive bias" for some broad meaning of the latter. But...

> Some have argued that neuroimaging technologies such as functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) can help determine whether placebo effects are independent of response bias (27). For example, one team of researchers has reported that placebo responses occur in pain-related areas of the brain during the time of stimulation and not only during assessment (28), while other researchers have shown that spinal cord mechanisms are involved with placebo analgesia (29). These experiments seem to indicate that at least some of the observed effect of placebo in an experimental setting is independent of response bias; however, they cannot rule out the hypothesis that some of the observed clinical effect is due to response bias.

Note that response bias, whith which the placebo effect is contrasted above, is a specific \[cognitive\] bias.

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Tags: bias, cognitive
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title: Performance of a damaged brain

text:
# Question
Title: Performance of a damaged brain
I have heard stories/reports that if a certain part of the brain (taking care of certain functions) is damaged other parts take over the function of the damaged part.

Intuitively this could mean 2 things:

* We are not using the brain to its full capability.
* The performance of the brain will take a hit due to other brain centers taking over the functionality of the damaged center.

For me the first one does not make sense since evolutionary selection makes sure we are endowed with the most efficient systems. So what is happening exactly when brain centers get damaged?

# Answer
> 2 votes
To the question "what is happening exactly when brain centres get damaged?". The answer is: When any tissue, including neural tissue, in the body gets damaged, the body will try to repair them. The process of reparation involves many distinct processes, such as the process to get rid of the damaged tissue and the process to regenerate new tissue. But compared with other tissues, such as skin, mucosa, and connective tissue in general, neural tissue has a much more limited capability to regenerate, yet it is not zero. Also, in the nervous system, neural plasticity, which is the adaptation of other neural tissue to perform the function that is impaired or lost, plays the role in the process of reparation too. The following articles may help explain this matter in more details: ref1 and ref 2, and ref3. And some animal studies of neural plasticity: ref4 and ref.

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Tags: neuroscience, neurophysiology, brain
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# Question
Title: DISC correlation with Big Five personality
Apparently DISC (dominance, inducement, submission, and compliance) is a kind of personality test.

When/where is it used and how does it correlate with Big Five?

# Answer
> 5 votes
According to Jones and Hartley (2013), it's a test seldom mentioned in textbooks, but "used extensively in industry", more precisely in business organizations. Thee same paper also provides cross-correlation with Big Five factors:

Since the names in the left column of this table are a bit unusual ("left factors"), they are (in this order)

* the opposite of Extraversion
* the opposite of Openness
* the opposite of Agreeableness
* Conscienscouness (not negated)
* the opposite of Neuroticism

Also the Wikipedia descriptions of "DISC" factors don't quite agree with Jones and Hartley, which give them as

* Drive/Dominance (D) – task-oriented, fast-mover, bottom-line-oriented
* Influence (I) – people-oriented, energetic, desire popularity and praise
* Steadiness (S) – very people and family-oriented, motivated by loyalty and security, slower-moving
* Compliance/Conscientiousness (C) – task and detail-oriented, wants all information, slower-moving

The correlations are pretty weak, but some "conclusions" are amusing: to be "stable" (i.e. non-neurotic in Big Five terms) one needs to be steady/submissive (and not dominant/driven) and the opposite goes for "tough-minded", or otherwise put, being agreeable looks (again) like being submissive/steady and not dominant. Being "closed minded" is correlated with being steady/submissive and not being good at influencing/inducing other people. And an introvert is "compliant" (??) and again not good at influencing other people. These "conclusions" don't make a lot of sense to me, except maybe the last one...

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Tags: personality, test, big-five
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# Question
Title: What happens if you lie to a child during language acquisition?
During language acquisition a child can learn 20 words a day. What would happen if the parent decided to lie to the child during this time so that whenever the child said "what that?" the parent made up a random word.

Would this permanently stay in the child's mind forever? Or would the child just learn the "real" word from everyday speech?

As an aside, for years I thought the word "modest" meant the opposite of what it means. Because it is only ever said sarcastically. As in "wow, your *sooooo* modest!" And that's just one word.

# Answer
You would need a conspiracy of many people to prank a child with this kind of thing, because kids are really good at tracking the information value of sources. If you give a different random word every time they'll discount you as an information source, if you give the same random word every time they'll learn it... and use it only with you (more or less, but increasingly so with age/experience.) See Birch et al. (2008) for more details.

You might also have fun with the literature on early bilingualism, which is basically this situation, right? Kids are *phenomenal* at this. See for example Liberman et al. (2017).

<sub> Birch, S. A., Vauthier, S. A., & Bloom, P. (2008). \[Three-and four-year-olds spontaneously use others’ past performance to guide their learning.\]\[\] Cognition, 107(3), 1018-1034.
Liberman, Z., Woodward, A. L., Keysar, B., & Kinzler, K. D. (2017). Exposure to multiple languages enhances communication skills in infancy. Developmental science, 20(1), e12420. </sub>
> 5 votes

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Tags: language
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# Question
Title: Could we develop a notion of conceivability that would allow us to imagine impossible/inconsistent/illogical things?
There are things that we cannot imagine because they are impossible (like a solution to Russell's set theory, since it is impossible to reach that solution because it is illogical.)

Some months ago, discussing with a user in this site, he said that although no one has reached that notion, it could be the case that someone in the future could achieve it, but he did not know the topic well enough to make any meaningful conclusion. (https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/73718/2018/2/28)

Maybe someone here could help me

So could we develop a notion of conceivability that would allow us to imagine all of these things? Even all things that do not exist or cannot exist or are impossible like a solution to Russell's set problem or a thing that is illogical but at the same time is logical or inventing a new logic (or illogic) system...etc? What would be needed to reach such notion of conceivability? A change in the laws of physics? Or just biological evolution in our brains??

# Answer
There's a serious science of the theoretical limits of representation / information processing in CS, in complexity theory & computability theory. You can pull some of that stuff across to cognitive science, the question 'what level of the complexity hierarchy does language sit at' has a decent track record of productivity, it's not totally crazy to ask the same thing of cognition in general.

For me, there's a satisfying answer in https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/index.html, although if you start at the beginning, it takes a little while to get there. In the lecture videos, it's the bit where he puts on the wizard hat. Because if you're going to answer a question as profound as this one, it's best to wear a cool hat when you do.

This is not the only answer, some folks believe in literal quantum cognition, so you could go chat to them too. They're kinda fringe at the moment, and I'm not a subscriber, but they are very smart people and the only game in town if you want think about going beyond Church-Turing.
> 2 votes

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Tags: neuroscience, evolution, brain, thought
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title: Why do teenagers take so many selfies?

text:
# Question
Title: Why do teenagers take so many selfies?
I know that there is a similar question about this

But my question is different. In fact I'm talking about teenagers and I'm asking the causes of this fact, not if there is a correlation with narcissism.

Well, I've noticed that social network users are mostly female (I mean, people who post more selfies are girls). And in my school almost every girl (500 girls) posts selfies. Why? Why do they need it? Furthermore their photos are strange, they usually pose in a weird way. Here are some examples:

First

Second

Then, why do girls post much more than guys?

# Answer
> 5 votes
The question you link to has an answer which says: "narcissism in US men" which is quite a different category than what you ask here. Selfie-ism or Selfitis is not a disorder, or by default narcissistic.

> Why do \[female\] teenagers take so many selfies?

Statista, on their webpage "Selfies Are All About Appearance", reports on a Georgia Institute of Technology study of 2.5M Instagram selfies titled: "Selfie-Presentation in Everyday Life: A Large-Scale Characterization of Selfie Contexts on Instagram" (ICWSM 2017), by Julia Deeb-Swihart, Christopher Polack, Eric Gilbert, and Irfan Essa, that out of those whom do take selfies the percentages are 59% female and 41% male.

> I'm asking the causes of this fact, not if there is a correlation with narcissism.

It's not all about appearance, only 52%; with 14% family, friends and pets, 13% about ethnicity or nationality, 7% travel, 5% health and fitness, with the remaining 9% falling into other categories.

For the appearance category the reasoning is:

* Most: Comments, compliments and likes. (World Disclosure).
* Confirmation: I am wearing properly applied makeup, and have great clothes.
* Look: Where I am, what I have, where I go, whom I know.

The Georgia Tech study: "Selfies: We Love How We Look and We’re Here to Show You" offers these graphs showing the most popular selfie type and who shares the most selfies:

**As you can see the belief that teen age girls share the most selfies is not correct.**

It is the skew of the search engines that produces this belief, it not supported by studies.

> Furthermore their photos are strange, they usually pose in a weird way.

See the result of using Google to search for "female selfies" \- the results are not particularly different than the two examples you provided, nor would I describe them as weird. See the Selfie Explorer Tool (after the next paragraph) for an analysis of poses.

While not directly part of the question the website SuggestMe has a webpage regarding the travel aspect: "Tourists and locals love taking selfies in London" showing the top 10 most popular cities, places, and places per city. Establishing *proof* that one is worldly, sophisticated, versed in the ways of the world.

The "Selfie Explorer Tool" at SelfieCity allows you to generate requests for specific types of selfies based on attributes such as demographics, pose, features, or mood. It also shows which types are more prevalent.

A NYTimes article: "The real reason men hate women taking selfies" offers:

> "There are few harmless actions that seem to infuriate guys more than young women taking selfies.
>
> And it is mostly young women who have been snapping pictures of their faces and posting them to Instagram since the social-media platform’s inception in 2010. In 2014, a survey by photography app Selfiecity revealed that in New York, 23-year-old females take the most selfies and 62 percent of selfies are taken by women. (That’s still less than in other cities — in Moscow, for instance, 82 percent of selfies depict female faces.)
>
> Taking pictures of yourself is an action that harms precisely zero people, but you wouldn’t know that the way some people respond.
>
> ...
>
> Male journalists regularly rail against the practice. ... There’s a fairly common refrain in these pieces that selfie takers are “narcissistic,” despite the fact that a 2017 study from Brigham Young University indicated that’s not generally true. As Alicia Eler points out in her new book “Selfie Generation” (Skyhorse Publishing), “Generally, it’s men telling women that they are narcissists for selfie-ing.” She further remarks that “young women are simultaneously told that their self-worth depends on their appearance, but they are referred to as ‘vain’ and ‘narcissistic’ if they post selfies, which are all about appearance.”

Psychology Today has an article: "Get Over Selfie Shame!" as does a NYTimes article: "The real reason men hate women taking selfies" and Snopes: "Rumor: The American Psychiatric Association has classified the taking of 'selfies' as a mental disorder" disagreeing with the snap diagnosis.

An important problem to acknowledge is the so-called "Snapshot Dysmorphia" a term coined by Drs. Susruthi Rajanala, Mayra Maymone, and Neelam Vashi, in "Selfies — Living in the Era of Filtered Photographs", where people visit plastic surgeons with selfies that have been adjusted by filters using a program such as Facetune and expect to receive surgery to look like their more perfect self.

The danger of taking selfies has prompted even the Russian government's Interior Ministry to offer a "Safe Selfie" guide:

> "**Safe Selfies**
>
> Your health and your life is more valuable than millions of likes in social networks!
>
> The Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia is concerned about the increasing number of traumatizations and even deaths when trying to make a unique self. Each of these cases could be prevented. For this purpose, the Memorandum "Safe Self" was created in the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia, designed to draw attention, primarily to young people, to this problem. We tried visually, in the form of pictograms, to depict the most traumatic cases of creating selfies, thereby to warn citizens against unjustified risk for the sake of a memorable frame.
>
> When a person tries to take a picture of himself - his attention is distracted, his balance is lost, he does not look around and does not feel danger. Do SELFI, making sure that you are in a safe place and your life is not threatened!
>
> We hope that our initiative will be supported in all regions, will support young people, adults and children.
>
> Download PDF version of Reminder.".

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Tags: social-networks, self
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title: Why do views make you happy?

text:
# Question
Title: Why do views make you happy?
Why does having a nice view from your window make you happy? (As in people ask for a hotel room with a nice view).

Could this be replicated by simply having a large TV screen showing a view?

What views make people the happiest/saddest?

# Answer
> 3 votes
"Nice" window views do improve well-being, but with "nice" meaning "nature" mostly:

> The most consistent finding in the literature is that people prefer natural rather than built or urban views from windows. Windows with views of nature were found to enhance work and well-being in a number of ways including increasing job satisfaction, interest value of the job, perceptions of selfproductivity, perceptions of physical working conditions, life satisfaction, and decreasing intention to quit and the recovery time of surgical patients. However, the access to a view did not improve the performance of students or actual productivity of office workers.

and later

> The preference of people for natural over built or urban views is one of the earliest and most consistent findings in the window literature \[numerous citations\].

From Kelly M. J. Farley and Jennifer A. Veitch (2001) "A Room With A View: A Review of The Effects of Windows on Work and Well-being".

And apparently art works of nature do have some effect as well, but I don't know the exact level of substitutability (beyond "real is better"):

> But perhaps the quickest and cheapest way to reap the benefits of biophilia – albeit not the most effective – is to install artworks showing natural scenes. Browning cites a 2008 study in which office workers were put in a room with closed curtains, with a garden view or with a flat-screen TV with the same dimensions and view as the window. After they received a stressor, the blood pressure and heart rate of those volunteers with the real view dropped the fastest and lowest, followed by those with the simulated view. “Both real nature and representations of nature suffice,” Browning explains, but “real is better.”

From https://www.ioshmagazine.com/article/office-wellbeing-desk-view which unfortunaltely doesn't have a references list, so I couldn't locate that study right away.

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As for why people like nature better, an evolutionary theory (quoting again from Farley and Veitch) is that

> In summary, Ulrich’s (1983) psychoevolutionary theory suggests that acquiring a capacity for restorative responding to certain unthreatening natural contents and configurations had important advantages for humans during evolution. These included rapid attenuation of stress responses following threatening encounters, and fostering recharge of physical energy. In fact, Ulrich (1983), argued that modern humans are biologically prepared to quickly and readily acquire restorative responses with respect to unthreatening natural settings, but have no such preparedness for most urban or built contents and configurations.

It was criticized by others though (for incompleteness etc.), and as with many such evolutionary explanations of psychological phenomena, it's hard to test. And the critics propose instead:

> In contrast to Ulrich (1983) and Ulrich et al., (1991), R. Kaplan and S. Kaplan (1989) proposed the Attention Restoration Theory (ART) arguing that recovery from directed attention fatigue (restoration of effectiveness) could be accomplished by using modes of attending that required no effort. For these authors, James’ (1892) concept of involuntary attention partially explained the preference of many people for natural rather than urban views. Natural environments, they argued, are restorative because the involuntary attention (or fascination) they engender requires no effort on the part of the perceiver. In this way, natural scenes are advantageous to human health because they provide an opportunity for recovery from mental fatigue.

In fact ART proposes four factors that affect the restorative properties of a view:

> **Fascination**, as the ability of an environment to generate awe in people; the amount of awe can give the directed attention a rest as it appears the involuntary attention in its place. **Being away**, a feeling that can be in objective or subjective form, as a person can be far away from a location or let his or her mind let go from everyday life and worries. **Extension** \[aka extent\], referring to the connection between each element found in an environment; the feeling of being able to travel through the environment in order to look for information it provides to the observer. **Compatibility**, characteristics found in an environment that meet the preferences and goals of a person.

There is some empirical evidence that the Kaplans may be mostly correct, except for "being away" being two things actually:

> Laumann et al. (2001) found a five factor structure in their data gathered with the RCS, largely in line with the four factor structure as proposed by Kaplan and Kaplan (1989). However, the being away factor split into two factors: a physical component (referred to as **novelty**), and a psychological component (referred to as **escape**). This finding seems plausible, because Kaplan and Kaplan’s definition of being away also has two components: a physical component (being in different setting than usual), and a psychological component (being able to escape from unwanted distractions and reminders of your daily obligations). So, the distinction between the two being away components is plausible both theoretically and empirically.

This five factor model has been mostly confirmed in subsequent research, e.g. by Pals et al. (2009) but not all factors seem to come up in some contrasts; most doubt being about compatibility. And there has been further investigation from that group on how fascination actually works.

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Tags: emotion, vision, environmental-psychology
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# Question
Title: Study on the learning of programming concepts in pre-university students
I want to investigate the ability of a group of students to learn programming concepts in one hour.

The students are grouped by ages: 6 - 17. The tasks are divided into concept and type. Each concept has example tasks, to correct code, to copy code and to write code without help. I measure the number of tasks completed and the time elapsed in each one.

What is the best way to analyze this data? And to represent them?

UPDATE

I wanted to compare the performance of students by age and gender.

I draw a simple bar chart with the means of the tasks performed correctly.

But the experiments have different durations and much dispersion. There is some more reliable statistical method than analyzing only the mean.

I am not an expert in the subject and neither in statistics.

# Answer
> 1 votes
If you want to report the dispersion, add some error bars, or better do a box plot, or even violin plot, but the latter require understanding of less introductory concepts (for tuning purposes). For a non-graphical presentation of e.g. age by task (and by gender as well), see contingency table. These can be nested.

If you want to know if there are significant differences between the groups, read about the F-test. If want to test diffrences between individual tasks, you can do that too (e.g. t-test), but you have to worry about adjusting for multiple comparisons.

I will not go into further details because this board is unsuitable for giving you a stats 101 education. And so is Wikipedia, by the way; its articles on such topics are generally too technical for the mere practitioner of statistics. It's best you talk to someone who has had at least that stat 101 level of education, although it would be better with someone who at least \[still\] practices statistics on some level. All else failing, read an intro textbook of applied statistics; or see coursera for a free class etc.

You should also learn how to use a software package that does all of these, e.g. R or SPSS. Depending how good you are at programming you may find one or the other easier. With software like these, you can also easily do plot arrays that basically iterate over a covariate's (e.g. gender) level (i.e. values). There's no standard name for these, R calls them facets; SPSS calls them panel plots.

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Tags: data, analysis, validation
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# Question
Title: At what age are women perceived to be most attractive?
Someone once quoted a research at me:

Men were shown photographs of female body parts and asked to judge the attractiveness. The result was that men (of all ages) found 14 year old females the most (sexually) attractive.

I have tried to locate this or similar research, but to no avail.

**Do you know of experiments researching at what age (men or) women are perceived to be most attractive (by male or female judges)?**

Are there any moderators of this judgement (like age or gender of judge)?

# Answer
> 13 votes
OkCupid, a free online dating website (through which I've met two girlfriends myself, incidentally), does some pretty interesting research on the profiles and activity of its users. This particular research blog post presents some fairly on-topic results in "Exhibit C: Looks":

@ArtemKaznatcheev rightly pointed out some range restriction here, so this can't address the validity of an age estimate below 18 years directly, but two things are worth noting:

* The overall slope resembles a simple linear trend that might continue upward past 18 years young.
* The absolute maximum here appears to be around 19, not 18. I doubt the difference is "significant".

It's not clear to me whose ratings these are or how exactly they were collected (as a user of the site, I remember a 1-5 rating index, and chose to rate women only), so it's hard to trust these results, especially in terms of their representativeness of a general population. Artem also pointed out that a better method for controlling social desirability in these ratings would hide direct information on age from respondents; OkCupid's research differs from the kind you're asking about in that regard too. Nonetheless, it's an empirical hint at the more explicit answer to the related, subjective question where respondents do have this info. Social desirability and age info are present in many normal social interactions after all, so removing age info deliberately might reduce naturalistic applicability of results anyway.

This blog post presents many more graphs on related topics that might interest you (e.g., as alternative operationalizations of attractiveness, or as behavioral correlates), but only one seems to address a moderator directly. That moderator is attractiveness itself! A quote follows this graph:

> If you separate out the absolute best-looking women, almost all of whom are very young, and also remove the people you won't realistically want to date (the worst-looking women), you find that everyone else's attractiveness doesn't change much with age.
>
> In other words, given that nobody is drop-dead gorgeous or drop-dead hideous, your average 25 year-old is roughly as good-looking as your average 35 year-old. Yes, throwing out the prettiest of the pretty young things is a clumsy handicap to put on an age-by-age comparison. But at the same time, for the vast majority of men, the best-looking women are simply out of reach, so it's actually accurate to exclude them as possibilities. In fact, unrealistic male expectations inspired this article, so we want to do everything we can to correct for them.
>
> Many of you are probably scoffing at the idea that many 35 year-olds are as attractive as many 25 year-olds, but there are social factors at work that you might not consider as you go through life making judgments. Most importantly: nationwide, thirtysomethings are much more likely to be married and therefore much more likely to have stopped optimizing their attractiveness. So the typical 35 year-old woman you see out in the world isn't representative of the single 35 year-olds who are still dating and looking good.

**I'm particularly doubtful of this second graph though**, because it doesn't seem clear that the top and bottom deciles were identified and excluded separately within each year of age. "If you separate out the absolute best-looking women, almost all of whom are very young" actually sounds more like excluding the top decile while ignoring age, which might invalidate this graph. Removing the most extreme deciles of the sample while ignoring age would necessarily flatten the "everybody else" line somewhat, given any asymmetry in relationships between age and membership in these deciles of attractiveness across all ages.

---

**Edit by *what*. Delete or edit as you see fit.**

Nick, I too see a problem with how the most and least attractive women were deleted from the sample. I add this as an edit, as it does not warrant its own answer, but is too long for a comment.

If attractiveness declines with age, we must assume that it declines equally for all women, until this is disproven. So we must assume that a woman who is among the most beautiful at age 21, while still among the most beautiful at age 35, will have lost in overall attractiveness. The same goes for the average and the unattractive woman. We must assume (because we don't have the data) that over all women of all ages and all levels of attractiveness, we have a parallel decline in attractiveness with age, as shown in the graph below:

Now, if you delete the most and least attractive women from your sample, across all ages, you will, as the graph shows, create a sub-sample with no decline in attractiveness. **This is an artifact of you tampering with the data and has no explanatory power whatsoever.**

If on the other hand you delete the most and least attractive women *for each age group*, the general "slant" of the graph and the decrease in attractiveness that it represents does not change at all.

What I believe is that okcupid.com do not want to anger their older female customers, so they pimped or sugarcoated their data in a way that flatters the vanity of those women and allays their fears of being unattractive. In short: this section of their blog is advertising, not research.

# Answer
> 6 votes
No. Female beauty is believed to be related to the physical traits of their fertility which is maximized in the 20s. Men prefer partners around the age of 20 for one night stands (this is true for their sexual fantasies as well) and for long term partners sometimes older than 20s but generally younger than themselves. Women prefer sexual partners of their own age.

> The present study examined desired minimum and maximum ages for mates across five different levels of relationship involvement (marriage, serious relationship, falling in love, casual sex, and sexual fantasies) comparing individuals of 20, 30, 40, 50, and 60 years old. Consistent with previous findings, women preferred partners of their own age, regardless of their own age and regardless of the level of relationship involvement. Men, on the other hand, regardless of their own age, desired mates for short-term mating and for sexual fantasies who were in their reproductive years. However, with regard to long-term mates, men preferred mates who, although younger than them, were sometimes above the age of maximum fertility. Explanations for these findings are discussed.

-Age preferences for mates as related to gender, own age, and involvement level

> In the absence of contraception, female fertility reaches its maximum in the mid-twenties (which is the estimated age of evolved attractive composites), declines by about 20% in the mid-thirties, and then falls precipitously by a further 60% during the forties

-Mate choice decisions: the role of facial beauty

> female beauty can best be explained by a sexual selection viewpoint, whereby selection favors cues that are reliable indicators of fertility.

-Female facial beauty: The fertility hypothesis

# Answer
> 5 votes
There's data in this reddit post that points to about 14 being the age girls are at their most attractive to men (exactly as biology predicts): Science AMA Series: We are Alan Sanders, Michael Bailey, and Gary Beecham, co-authors of a recently published study on the genetics of male sexual orientation, Ask Us Anything!.

# Answer
> 2 votes
Waist to hip ratio seems to be a strong indicator of mate choice, even more than facial beauty (which was alluded to above). Google scholar will point you to hundreds of articles concerning the subject. Hence the age group with the 'optimum' waist to hip ratio (~0.7) will tend to be favored by men.

# Answer
> 0 votes
My biggest Problems with studies like the Okcupid...they only allow for members 18+. So you end up with data skewed a bit higher than would probably be norm. Also with the social stigma of finding someone attractive underage, if the person is aware they would say NO. Also men in their 20's tend to want a girl they can take drinking so that it is somewhere they are familiar/comfortable with and of course, drunk girls are easier (not condoning in any way just saying it happens)

I have heard of these studies too. And they get buried from search engines with these new "studies" On I heard came up with 15 and one was 16. The 16 one I know a place you can find it: The documentary are all men Pedophiles

http://watchdocumentaries.com/are-all-men-pedophiles/

At 5:28 he quotes a guy, who did the pathological studies. And the whole thing is full of the kind of general info you might be looking for. I would just give you the guy's name but it's foreign, being spoken by someone with a mild accent. I just have no idea.

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Tags: social-psychology, physical-attraction
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# Question
Title: Do other forms of bias have their own terminologies, similar to "Stockholm Syndrome"?
Three examples would be:

Someone who makes an expensive purchase, and even when they are met with objective facts stating why it was a inferior purchase, they continue to sing it's praise.

Someone who blindly follows and defends their political party affiliation, even when confronted with facts showing why it's a bad affiliation.

Someone who commits to a lifestyle choice, and even when confronted with facts showing why it's a bad choice, they refused to believe it.

I know an all encompassing term might be cognitive bias, but I was hoping for specific terminologies to the three types of biases above.

# Answer
> 1 votes
Yes, Wikipedia even has a list.

> Someone who makes an expensive purchase, and even when they are met with objective facts stating why it was a inferior purchase, they continue to sing it's praise.

This is related to the endowment effect and sunk costs fallacy.

> Someone who blindly follows and defends their political party affiliation, even when confronted with facts showing why it's a bad affiliation.
>
> Someone who commits to a lifestyle choice, and even when confronted with facts showing why it's a bad choice, they refused to believe it.

These are both fairly closely related, and there are several types of bias that could contribute to either - you'd have to have more information about what led to that bias, as you are sort of describing the 'symptoms' rather than causes. Conservativism bias, confirmation bias, bandwagon effects, social comparison biases, selective perception, reactance, and more.

However, I would also encourage you to be wary of the many forms of bias that cloud your judgment of others, as well. If you are perceiving people as being part of a 'bad affiliation' or making a 'bad choice' you should consider that your own biases may cause you to discount the reasons for those decisions. You may value different things than they do, and those differences in values may or may not be related to cognitive bias per se, but also simply individual differences in personality, life experience, etc.

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Tags: bias
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# Question
Title: Is there a formal name for the compulsive and recurrent urges to pick one's nose in order to remove perceived imperfections?
Under which formal category does the following condition fall?: the condition of experiencing frequent and compulsive urges to pick one's nose searching for any possible perceived imperfections (be they wet snot, dry snot and even scabs) in order to remove them or "smooth them out" by means of scratching, in a sort of endless pursuit for a sensation of perfect smoothness within one's nose (endless because the sensation of perfect smoothness is never quite achieved and usually the scratching itself leads to bleeding and scabs which paradoxically become the fuel for future nose picking sessions, in an endless cycle). Likewise, are there any formal treatments to cure this particular condition? How effective are these treatments? Are there any studies on this? References are very welcomed.

# Answer
> 4 votes
Excoriation disorder (ED) formerly known as dermatillomania, and more popularly as Skin Picking Disorder (SPD):

> a mental disorder characterized by the repeated urge to pick at one's own skin, often to the extent that damage is caused.

The status as a separate disorder is somewhat controversial, because of high comorbidity:

> There has been controversy over the creation of a separate category in the DSM-5 for excoriation (skin picking) disorder. Two of the main reasons for objecting to the inclusion of excoriation disorder in the DSM-5 are: (1) that excoriation disorder may just be a symptom of a different underlying disorder, e.g. OCD or BDD, and (2) that excoriation disorder is merely a bad habit and that by allowing this disorder to obtain its own separate category it would force the DSM to include a wide array of bad habits as separate syndromes, e.g., nail biting and **nose-picking**.

Your case seems to be one of those overlapping ones.

There's also a 2017 neuroimaging study which concludes:

> data offer partial support for the view that sub-cortical structures contribute to the pathophysiology of SPD, both supporting its categorization as an OC-Related Disorder in DSM-5 and suggesting that there exists a pathophysiological difference between SPD and OCD.

Wikipedia has a lot to say about various treatments even though

> Knowledge about effective treatments for excoriation disorder is sparse despite the prevalence of the condition.

The usual suspects have been tried: SSRIs, anti-psychotics, anticonvulsants, glutamatergic agents (used to treat drug addictions) etc. As well cognitive-behavioral psychotherapies. It's not clear from there what might be most effective.

Wikipedia aside, there's been a "preliminary meta-analysis" published in 2014, but its review at CRD notes:

> Authors' conclusions:
> Both pharmacological and psychological interventions appeared to be effective in reducing the severity of pathological skin picking; psychological interventions could have a larger effect.
>
> CRD commentary:
> The authors did not report a quality assessment, so it is difficult to know how reliable the results of the individual studies were. Many of the studies had designs prone to bias. Details about the comparator interventions, in the studies with control groups, were not reported. Given the heterogeneity across the studies, the limited reporting of study details and the unknown quality of the included studies, it seems inappropriate that the results were statistically synthesised, particularly for pharmacological and psychological interventions, for pathological skin-picking severity.

So I wouldn't put too much stock on it.

A more recent (2016) meta-analysis has basically the same conclusions; this one was not reviewed at CRD, but it relies basically on the same small number of studies. Its conclusions were similar to the "preliminary" one: psychotherapy seems to work better than medication based on the limited data available. It only looked at SSRIs and lamictal for medication though.

There's also a 2016 RCT on N-acetylcysteine, published in a high-impact journal, concluding:

> N-acetylcysteine \[NAC\] treatment resulted in significant reductions in skin-picking symptoms and was well tolerated.

The result was fairly unsurprising given that NAC was previously found effective for trichotillomania (TTM -- hair pulling) as well; both studies with NAC were conducted by the same research group. But there were a few more interesting comments on those papers:

> In striking contrast with what we know about OCD, SSRIs have not been proved to be superior to placebo in TTM treatment. As for ED, the evidence regarding the efficacy of SSRIs is still scarce. **So far, there are no US Food and Drug Administration–approved treatments for ED** and TTM. The divergent results of the trials testing either SSRIs or NAC for ED/TTM and OCD suggest that treatments may not be used interchangeably between OCD and related disorders.
>
> In addition, results from genetic studies also suggest that the neurobiology of pathological grooming may not be necessarily related to OCD. It had been demonstrated that Sapap3 knockout mice groomed themselves excessively. However, using family-based association analyses, Bienvenu et al found that variation within the human equivalent of the Sapap3 gene appeared associated with ED/TTM, but not with OCD. The conflicting results regarding the efficacy of NAC for ED/TTM and OCD, in addition to the findings of translational studies, suggest that the neural basis of repetitive behaviors observed in patients with these disorders might not be the same. So far, similarities between ED/TTM and OCD do not seem to go beyond the characterization by repetitive behaviors and some degree of familial aggregation.

(But note that this last statement appears somewhat incorrect in view of the 2017 neuroimaging study--some overlap with OCD seems to exist after all.)

NHS Choices also has consumer-oriented page on "Skin picking disorder " which doesn't say much I haven't told you already except for some behavioral tips. YMMV.

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Tags: addiction, compulsive
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# Question
Title: What is the difference between affect and feeling?
What exactly is the difference between affect and feeling?

Affect seems to refer to conscious experience:

> **Affect** is the experience of feeling or emotion.

And confusingly, so does feeling:

> In psychology, the word is usually reserved for the conscious subjective experience of emotion.

I realize that the definitions of emotion and mood are dicey as there are several different approaches (with corresponding definitions) in common use today. But is it the same for affect and feeling? Are there accepted definitions, or even accepted parts of definitions? Or do definitions depend on the emotion model?

# Answer
> 8 votes
According to constructionists (e.g., Russell & Barrett, 1999), affect (or "core affect") is a composite of valence and arousal, which underlies all emotional experience. So when I feel good and highly aroused, that's **affect**. When I categorize my affect (good, high arousal) as excitement, that's an **emotion**.

According to those who consider emotions to be multi-componential reactions to the environment (e.g., Gross, 1998), **affect** is an umbrella word to describe anything related to emotions or mood. It's definition isn't as specific as the one above.

On the other hand, "**feelings**" has no specific definition. It's a vague term that most emotion theorists don't use because it could refer to almost anything (e.g., interoception, nociception, exteroception like touch). To specify that feelings are specific to the affective domain, we often use the phrase **affective feelings**, but it's not a word that's central to any modern emotion theory that I know of.

So when in doubt, don't use the word *feelings*. But do use *affect*, *emotion*, or *mood*, as long as you explicitly define them using whatever theory you subscribe to.

# Answer
> 4 votes
According to Shouse (2005):

Feelings are personal, emotions are social and affect is prepersonal. In other words, feelings are how we understand and label our sensations, based on our own experiences. Emotions are how we project these socially (through facial expressions etc.) Emotions can therefore be manipulated to fit with social norms. Affect is more abstract and is the 'non-conscious experience of intensity' felt through the body, before we name and categorise it.

**Reference**
Shouse. Feeling, Emotion, Affect. M/C Journal 8.6 (2005)

# Answer
> 0 votes
See the article by Shouse, E. (2005), "Feeling, emotion, affect."

Affect is the basic element in non (or more than) representational theories.

<sub> Shouse, E. (2005). Feeling, emotion, affect. M/c journal, 8(6), 26. </sub>

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Tags: emotion, terminology
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# Question
Title: How does Kohlberg's moral reasoning work, can I measure it myself?
Is there any way I can work out what stage Kohlberg would claim I was operating at?

I do refer, when thinking about what is best, permissible, etc., to laws and other people's opinions, punishment etc., but not as conclusive judgments on what is right or wrong etc., only as one aspect of how to try to make that judgment myself. And while my actual judgments I would claim apply to anyone, not just myself, they are also provisional, and subject to revision, reappraisal.

With some exceptions:

My happiness is often more valuable than other's, maybe just because I'm especially well set to work on that. Likewise I wouldn't be obliged to martyr myself for any reason, e.g. to save a million lives, though I would say the same of anyone. And certain actions are always and unequivocally wrong, for anyone, they are that heinous.

I think enough and loosely enough about morality to say that I'm probably post conventional, and perhaps that's all that really does matter. But I wondered if I could learn more!

# Answer
That can't be answered with one particular stage because:

> Another criticism of Kohlberg’s theory is that people frequently demonstrate significant inconsistency in their moral judgements.\[26\] This often occurs in moral dilemmas involving drinking and driving and business situations where participants have been shown to reason at a subpar stage, typically using more self-interest driven reasoning (i.e. stage two) than authority and social order obedience driven reasoning (i.e. stage four).\[26\]\[27\] **Kohlberg’s theory is generally considered to be incompatible with inconsistencies in moral reasoning.** \[...\] Krebs and Denton have also attempted to modify Kohlberg’s theory to account for a multitude of conflicting findings, but eventually concluded that the theory is not equipped to take into consideration how most individuals make moral decisions in their everyday lives.

Having said that Wikipedia also mentions that some tests have been developed based on Kohlberg’s theory anyway, e.g. DIT (presumably averaging reasoning over a number questions), so you could try to take some of those tests.

As far as I can tell from their description(s), the DIT tests only involve abstractly reasoning about some scenarios that don't involve sellf-interest of the test-taker, so they don't quite seem to address the criticism, and they probably won't capture your exceptions in that area either, e.g "My happiness is often more valuable than other's". Krebs and Denton found that self-serving bias affects most people when it comes to moral judgements:

> Self-serving biases. In contrast to the third-person moral judgments evoked by Kohlberg’s test, most real-life moral judgments are made in the first person and second person. As examples, people say such things as “I was wrong; I should never have done that” and “You should do your share.” Krebs and Laird (1998) found that first-person moral judgments made by participants about transgressions they had committed were significantly more lenient than the third-person judgments they made about transgressions committed by others, especially when others’ transgressions were committed against them
> 1 votes

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Tags: moral-psychology
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title: Cognitive biases ontogenesis

text:
# Question
Title: Cognitive biases ontogenesis
Are cognitive biases "hardcoded" into our brain or learned? And have they evolved over time e.g. more cognitive biases could emerge evolutionally?

# Answer
> 1 votes
Either, depending on the bias. For example, the Müller-Lyer illusion could well have some significant learned aspects (how much is debated). Categorical perception of phonemes is a kind of bias, I guess, that's definitely mostly learning. At the other end of the spectrum supposedly 'irrational' context effects in decision making have been observed in slime molds, those are probably universal (so they're probably also adaptive).

In general it's probably not very useful to split cognition into 'biases' and 'the rest'. Maybe think of cognition as a memory system (with some flaws and a salience-not-probability weighting scheme) a reasoning/decision system (with limited resources and high time pressures) a perceptual system (facing a fundamentally underspecified problem) etc etc... the 'biases' are not really distinct processes. From that framing the question is hard to answer. If you singled out a particular bias, probably someone here could tell an evo story about how it came to be though! Maybe even a plausible one.

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Tags: cognitive-neuroscience, bias
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# Question
Title: How do I choose the correct sigma when applying a Gaussian filter to a fixation density map?
I am currently analysing some eye tracking data which I recorded in the lab.

For my fixation density maps I calculate tables showing the number of times participants made a fixation at a specific coordinate on the screen. I then filter them with a gaussian filter (with the matlab function imgaussfilter), however I am not sure how to choose sigma sensibly. I would like to adapt to a paper I based my experiment on. In the paper they used a '2D circular Gaussian Kernel with 0.5° full width at half maximum'. I am not fully sure what this means. Does degree mean visual degree? How can I transfer this to my analysis?

Best regards,

Anna

# Answer
Yes, they almost certainly mean visual degrees. I presume you know how to calculate visual angles at the distance of your display and how to transform your eye tracked data to that coordinate system.

Full width at half maximum (FWHM) means just what the individual words say: for a Gaussian filter, there are going to be two points on either side of the center that are half of the maximum height of the Gaussian.

When you mention authors writing *2D circular Gaussian Kernel with 0.5° full width at half maximum* they mean that the width of their kernel defined this way is 0.5 degrees (or more specifically, the diameter is 0.5 degrees, because they are talking about a 2D circular kernel).

Kernel widths can also be described as "half-width at half-maximum" which would be half of the FWHM.

See Wikipedia for a bit more: Full width at half maximum

To know what sigma to use, you will need to know how the units of your tracking measurements relate to visual degrees.
> 1 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, data, analysis, matlab
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# Question
Title: How else can we eliminate wrong underlying beliefs, when even science fails?
Source: *Why Do Many Reasonable People Doubt Science?*, 2015 March, by Joel Achenbach

> \[Andrew\] Shtulman \[of Occidental College\] ’s research indicates that as we become scientifically literate, we repress our naive beliefs but never eliminate them entirely. They lurk in our brains, chirping at us as we try to make sense of the world.

This staggered and overwhelmed me: How else can we correct, improve, and refine our lurking, substratal intuitions or instincts that are wrong? I ask NOT about simply accepting or tolerating facts or science superficially (as insinuated by this excerpt), and remain traumatised.

Footnote: The author has a BA in Politics, and not in science, if this implies anything?

# Answer
Our memory act as a very powerful database, being able to store a huge load of data. Thing is, that "instinctive data" you learned someday is still there. It might get erased eventually, but as it is "fetched" and used, it gets stronger.

Memory retrieval act akin to a computational weighted-graph navigation, where once you need to remember something, you start navigating in your memories. Memories with greater "weight" or "importance" may be fetched earlier and given a stronger "stamp", i.e., they are more relevant in a given context.

CONSTANTINI, WIKIPEDIA <sup>\*sigh\*</sup>:

> Learning and memory are direct consequences of attentional processing: the more attention is directed or devoted toward something, the more likely it is that it will be later learned and remembered.

SURESH, PAVAN KUMAR, AISHWARYA:

> \[page 2, §2\] Another example which everyone can associate or relate to is remembering an almost forgotten event after a very long time. It so happens that, when we come across a bite of a cookie after decades or smell of a perfume after a long time, we take time to recall what it is about and our association with it.
>
> ...
>
> \[page 3, §3\] \[In a face querying context\] In the **Memory Repeat**, the brain repeats the same querying activity until it deduces a relationship between the second image and the fifth image. Once a relationship is establishes, corresponding activities that are chained/outlined to form a bountiful array of events.
>
> Based upon the data present at the back of the brain, relevant output can be expected. The output might be an association of that image with certain events. It can either be the first time they met or the assignment that any had done together or a project/ paper that they had worked upon or classes they had attended, etc. It should, however be noted that not all images can yield a positive result. **Some associativity (read: data) may have gotten erased as the passage of time**.
>
> A positive result is named as Hit Rate and False Alarm Rate. Hit rate is the positive outcome of a query while False Alarm Rate is the irrelevant or negative outcome of the querying. False alarm rate is the output when an image (or a face) is identical to another image.

If the data is fetched, but never used, it will eventually wear off from the results, but it will only disappear from your brain upon physical memory removal, which takes time.
> 1 votes

# Answer
The Debunking Handbook provides an excellent guide to construct a myth-debunking article. The message that impacts me most is to **focus on the fact, not the myth.**

This is to increase the familiarity with the fact rather the myth, but for those who take the myth as their worldview, giving any counter-argument will only lead to by misunderstood or distorted, because it threatens their core beliefs and identity. They will cherrypick the information by selectively seek out which pieces that bolster their views (confirmation bias). In this case, it's best to focus the effort to the undecided majority, rather than the unswayable minority. However, if the message must be sent directly to them, it should couple with self-affirmation (make the person feel good), or be framed in a less threatening way.

# My view

But I think sugarcoating is no difference than cherrypicking. Let's say that person A is actually more correct than person B, but just a single moment that A considers themself as knowing better, then they are also in the same position of B, and sooner or later it's their turn to cherrypick B's words, despite how hard A tries to keep an opened mind. As long as A still worry about elucidating B, then they cannot be *mindful* about what B says.

If we are locked in our own perspective, then we need to ***transform*** our perspective first. Putting ourselves into other's shoes is easier said than done, but when the perspective transformation can be visualized, then it will be **fun**. If both sides can see the fun from it, then each of them will be *mindful* in the topic, and the conversation will be *joyful*.

I have two articles that explains my ideas in details:

1. Making concrete analogies and big pictures.
2. Straightforwardness, Fearlessness and Improvisation: How to find the fresh perspective?

Thanks for your reading.
> 1 votes

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Tags: bias, intuition
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# Question
Title: Does getting any job (no matter how demeaning) builds up one's character?
A certain blogger claims that

> \[if you\] Work a shitty job, it builds character \[nonetheless\].

I'm curious if there are any academic studies relating to this issue. Of course one needs to consider the definition of job carefully in this case: does prostitution count for instance (it's legal in some countries), or does drug dealing, i.e. are we talking about income, legal income or just doing work; what if it's unpaid work, e.g. volunteering? It would be really nice if some study went to such extents to distinguish between these in relation to the outcome..., but I'll settle for more generic descriptions of "job".

Also one would have consider what exactly "build character" translates into (psychologically speaking)... enhancing self-esteem, or something else I haven't thought of just yet. But I'll leave this aspect fairly open as well.

# Answer
I suppose much depends on what one means by "building character"; if it's increasing self-esteem, then the answer is probably no, as you've already pointed out. But I don't think that's what most people mean by building character. So what is it? Certainly you'll learn *something* from having a demeaning job, because you'll learn something from just about anything; also, it is likely to lower your expectations, so you might be more excited about any given other job and value the money you earn more (see for example this article). So it's probably possible to adjust the definition of "building character" until it's mostly true. But after twisting the definition too far, it's unclear that "building character" is a desirable thing to do, so it doesn't offer much in the way of advice for life.

Incidentally, it has been argued that most work in the US is actually fulfilling.
> 2 votes

# Answer
I'll gladly accept a more elaborate answer, but on a quick search I found a news release for study titled:

> Lousy jobs hurt your health by the time you’re in your 40s

And it's referring to mental health mostly. The data/sample is from a longitudinal study of 6,300 Americans (NLSY79). And the study's finding are that job dissatisfaction correlated pretty strongly with poor\[er\] mental health outcomes on five separate measures: depression, sleep problems, excessive worry, being diagnosed with emotional problems, and overall test of mental health.

So it looks like in this case "building character" by taking a "shitty job" translates to mental health problems being built... although one has to be a little concerned with reading causation where it might be just correlation. After all, job dissatisfaction might stem from the same genes that make one prone to depression. I'm not sure this study succeeded in separating cause from effect...
> 1 votes

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