title: Can one become addicted to learning?

text:
# Question
Title: Can one become addicted to learning?
**Is it possibly to become addicted to learning?**

What drives this addiction and how can it be controlled?

Note: I'm not sure this is the right exchange for this question... Its the best fit as far as I can see though.

# Answer
Any form of excessive secretion of dopamine, can not be good, be it drugs, learning, sex etc. workaholism is a form learning addiction, workaholism is said to be as an addiction very similar to alcoholism. Workaholic as a “person whose pleasure from learning things at work has become so extreme, that it indicates clear disturbances with his/her personal happiness, bodily health, and interpersonal relations, and with his smooth social functioning” . Therefore, there are some perspectives related to workaholism. workaholism at least initially was formulated to be referred as addictive process (Sussman, 2012). Negative side effects of workaholism or the strive or need to constantly work towards gaining knowledge may include subjective emotional sorrow or feeling of “burned out” (Sussman, 2012).

Based on that search, these authors induced that addiction includes: (a) engagement in the behavior to achieve appetitive effects (b) preoccupation with the behavior (c) temporary satiation (d)loss of control (e) suffering negative consequences hope my answer helped. if you want to read in depth on this. do refer to the reference for article. **reference : Sussman, S. (2012). Workaholism: A Review. Journal Of Addiction Research & Therapy. doi: 10.4172/2155-6105.s6-001**
> 3 votes

# Answer
According to Psychology Today,

> There is little research and no generally accepted definition of study addiction to date, such behavior has been analyzed within research into workaholism. The 'work addiction’ (i.e., workaholism) perspective, helped Dr. Cecilie Andreassen and her colleagues define study addiction (i.e., learning addiction) in a 2014 article of the Journal of Managerial Psychology as: *“Being overly concerned with studying, to be driven by an uncontrollable studying motivation, and to put so much energy and effort into studying that it impairs private relationships, spare-time activities, and/or health”.*

The journal article mentioned is actually from the *journal of behavioral addictions*:

Atroszko, P. A., Andreassen, C. S., Griffiths, M. D., & Pallesen, S. (2015). Study addiction—A new area of psychological study: Conceptualization, assessment, and preliminary empirical findings. *Journal of behavioral addictions, 4*(2), 75-84. https://doi.org/10.1556/2006.4.2015.007
> 1 votes

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Tags: learning, addiction
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# Question
Title: Papers/Resources on the source/process of shame and empathy
I am an economist, and almost all work on shame (very little work has been done on empathy in economics, we typically just jump to some form of altruism) has simply been on observed outcomes. That being said, I was wondering if there are any good reference text or papers (big researcher names are welcome) on more of the nature of such emotions.

# Answer
> 0 votes
Empathy is a topic that has been addressed extensively by **Frans de Waal**; he has been studying primates intensively and draws parallels between them and us. Especially the differences and commonalities between humans, bonobos and chimps is interesting. Check him out.

Scientific American (a non-peer reviewed scientific journal I'm reading a lot), had a special issue recently (*Sci Am*, September 2018) on why humans set themselves apart from other animal species. Tomasello has an interesting contribution there on the evolution of empathy and its role in the domination of mankind. An interesting read for sure.

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Tags: emotion, reference-request
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title: Mental stress inducing task

text:
# Question
Title: Mental stress inducing task
Mental arithmetic stress test is used widely to induce mental stress in laboratories. Can this test induce stress to those who are really good at mental calculation or enjoy mental math?

# Answer
**Stress** is a very broad term. For instance, I'm doing tests on **listening effort** using **pupillometry**. Pupillometry measures pupil diameter which is correlated to stress. More stress means larger pupils. Effortful listening is also a form of stress and hence indeed also evoke a pupil response.

I'm focusing on cochlear implant (CI) users, and these folks even have a lot of trouble understanding speech, especially in noise. But even in total silence (no background noise, normal 65 dB speech) they need to mentally focus on the task at hand. Hence they have large pupil responses even under optimal listening conditions.

However, normal hearing (NH) folks show, on average, also a substantial response in silence, although smaller than CI wearers.

To extrapolate these findings to your case by drawing the parallel between NH listeners (math proficient) and CI users (math deficient), I can assure you that even mathophiles do show a stress response, even for relatively simple math assignments.
> 1 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, social-psychology
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# Question
Title: How to recruit participants for fMRI study who do not fall asleep during experiment?
I'm in a psychology lab and we're having trouble getting participants for an fMRI study. We pay $150 per subject and we need to have several hundred healthy controls for one study. For the 20-minute study, the participant has to look at certain words and think about them, like imagining a scenario where "family" or "pride" was important.

We keep finding participants from recruiting around campus who will seem enthusiastic, then fall asleep immediately in the scanner. Our IRB states that we have to let them sleep for the full scan and pay them the full amount. I don't know how to prevent this. We've wasted thousands of dollars and weeks to months of time running studies with garbage data. Has anyone figured out how to recruit better participants?

# Answer
Based on my own experience as a student, the problem is probably not that your participants are lazy... the problem is that, like many university students, they're severely sleep-deprived.

While a student, I once agreed to participate in a friend's (non-MRI) study, which involved listening to sounds and clicking buttons in response. To my embarrassment, despite being enthusiastic about participating, I kept drifting off briefly during the study. I managed to complete it, but I'm sure my results were affected. I'm pretty sure that if I had ever tried to participate in an MRI study, I would have fallen completely asleep.

I don't have experience running MRI studies so I'm not really sure what to suggest to solve this problem, other than to try recruiting from less sleep-deprived populations, or redesigning the study tasks to be more engaging.
> 2 votes

# Answer
The problem is not your participants. It is your stimuli. They are too boring. Change them, or add a task participants must perform. It could be as simple as "Press a button to continue."

You will need to go through the ethics board again.
> 1 votes

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Tags: experiment-design
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# Question
Title: Procedures behind establishing the IQ scale
There are some good answers about testing individual's intelligence, and about mathematics side of the IQ scale, e.g:

> When current IQ tests are developed, the median raw score of the norming sample is defined as IQ 100 and scores each standard deviation (SD) up or down are defined as 15 IQ points greater or less,\[2\] although this was not always so historically. By this definition, approximately two-thirds of the population scores between IQ 85 and IQ 115, and about 5 percent of the population scores above 125.\[3\]\[4\]

What I wanted to ask though, is the organizational/"political" side of establishing the parameters of the test, the "calibration" procedure.

* Who (organization/person/entity) establishes or updates the coefficients which make the average test score for given age to correspond to IQ of 100, and the standard deviation increments of 15?
* Who is the test group: how is the tested population providing the raw data for establishing the above selected? (in particular, how to avoid selection bias: people *wanting* to take IQ tests, because they are (rightly) expecting getting good result and thus bragging rights of high IQ; people of low IQ avoiding the expected effort, frustration and shame).
* How does that look on the international landscape; are the coefficients established "per nation" and computed by national organizations, or are they global, or some other form yet?

# Answer
> 4 votes
Due to fact, that I can´t give a comment, I will post an answer, that is not sufficient. However, I hope this might give you little more insight. Furthermore, my knowledge mainly builds on german IQ Tests.

1.) Usually this is done by the institution/person etc., that has developed the IQ test. However, in some cases the parameters aren´t updated. So, you should always check for this. Especially in regard of very old IQ Tests and the Flynn effect

2.) First, the type of test-sample usually depends on the population, for which the IQ test is being developed (if you want an IQ test for intelligent people in their 20´s, you should go and try it at different universities). In case of Germany: a lot of IQ Tests usually take samples in different parts of Germany, with different demographic attributes. Usually people get paid for participating. Still, in most cases it is hard to sample a representative sample, due to fact that people with higher social status and intelligence tend to agree more easily in participating (“sadly”, you can´t force someone to take part). So, the aspects you have mentioned are indeed a huge problem, with which usually can´t be dealt perfectly. Sometimes people are told, that they won´t get feedback on their performance or only, if they wish to. As you might guess, this barely counters the problem. Furthermore, huge representative samples are expensive to gather. Therefore, the sad truth is, that in most cases it comes down to representative approximations (at least in Germany). These are the reasons why a lot of (german) IQ Tests are biased upwards (f.e. in the IST-2000R more people have been graduated from high School (="Abitur") than the average; this is even worse for the extended version - to counter that, the subsamples are weighted differently). Just as a little note: IQ tests for students are usually better normed, due to the fact, that they can be accessed more easily. Long story short: Researchers often try to cope with selection bias, but often can´t really avoid it.

3.) to be honest: I have no knowledge on the international landscape

Just as a little note: You will usually find more detailed information in the specific IQ manual. And: When you are using an IQ test, you should always think of whether or not your test-participant can be compared with the test-sample (you shouldn´t have any problems in comparing IQ performance of a 35 year old participant when the test-sample is representative for ages between 20-30, due to the fact, that the decrease in the average (fluid) intelligence from 20 to 35 is not that huge (as compared to the increase in the younger age, see f.e. Baltes (1997) Figure 3). But then of course, you can only make judgments relative to the (unrepresentative) test-sample, not to the whole population itself. This is also the reason, why i don´t really like statments like "my IQ is ...", because such statements always depend on the test-sample and test itself, that was being used.

An article, that is dealing (along with other aspects of the human development) with the development of fluid and crystallized intelligence across the lifespan: Baltes, P. B. (1997). On the incomplete architecture of human ontogeny: Selection, optimization, and compensation as foundation of developmental theory. *American psychologist*, 52(4), 366-380.

# Answer
> 2 votes
I've been involved in norming the German version of the WAIS-IV in 2012. The procedure for norming a psychological test is always the same:

1. A representative sample of the whole population is drawn.

What differs between tests is how the sample is drawn. For the WAIS-IV, equal numbers of persons where recruited for each age group (in, I believe, 5 year increments), gender, and educational level in four regions of Germany. So while, as @bucky has explained, certain groups of people are more willing to participate, we have filled each "bucket" of the sample with the same number of people. The effort to fill certain buckets was larger, but no subpopulation is overrepresented.

Other tests use different procedures to draw their samples, and this is one of the distinguishing criteria between different tests, and the reason why some tests (such as the Wechsler tests) are preferred above others.
2. The norming is usually done by the test author him- or herself when the test is first published. Later revisions are often normed by the test publisher with the help of "professional testers".

In the case of the WAIS-IV, the sample was tested by psychology students from four German universities who had been schooled in applying the test. The testing was supervised by specially schooled grad students. The norms where calculated from the sample test results by an experienced statistician. The whole procedure was supervised by psychologists working at the test publisher (Pearson).

Sometimes individuals (e.g. scholars) or organisations (e.g. universities) create norms for a population independent of the test author or publisher, and sometimes these norms are published (as scientific papers) for other scholars to use.

Sometimes norms for subpopulations that have not been sampled during the official norming are mathematically extrapolated, e.g. if persons over a certain age have not been part of the norming sample the curve of the age-by-result distribution is extended mathematically to include the missing ages.
3. Norms are always only applicable to the population the sample was drawn from. That is why the population is always mentioned along with the norms.

Large (in the sense of popularity and publication effort) tests such as the Wechsler tests are normed for each country, sometimes even for different subpopulations within a country (e.g. by gender, by age, for different occupational groups, for different test situations \[e.g. there are 10- and 20- minute normes for the Raven Progressive Matrices, depending on how much time you want to allow your probands to answer\], and so on).

If norms for one population that you would like to test (as a test user) do not exist, an experienced psychologist might estimate the test results from norms from another population when the relation between the two populations with regard to the tested construct is known.

(There is an ongoing intense debate about this procedure. Using intelligence as an example, when you use different norms for different populations, all populations will be equally intelligent. Norming means that the average person in that population *is defined as having* an IQ of 100. Their raw scored might differ! So when you use, for example, an African norm for Africans and a European norm for Europeans, Africans and Europeans appear to be equally intelligent. But when you use the same norm for both populations, the African population seems to have lower IQ. There are many different interpretations of this result – that Africans are less intelligent, that the tests culturally biased, that "intelligence", as tested by an IQ test, is dependent on schooling, that intelligence differs between cultures, and so on. What is for certain is that norming, even if it could be done perfectly, doesn't tell you what the test results mean.)

# Answer
> 0 votes
I was never working on developing intelligence tests, but as much as I have read and heard from my professors, could be stated in the short words considering international comparision of the results: For every test you are going to make, you should at first align at some theory of intelligence, according to which you are going to make the questions. Tnen, you give a bunch of these question to the sample. Acoording to their answers, you coose the questions on acording to their difficulty that some are so easy that almost everybody will be able to resolve them, some should be of the average difficulty and some very difficult. Than, you should calculate how many of these question should be in order to enable that the results of some population would take shape of the normal curve. Than you make that the aritmetic mean of this curve is marked with IQ 100, and one standard deviation of 15 IQ points. That is how is calculated. Of course you should assign to the arithmetic mean a value of 200, but it could be sligthly comlplcated for calculation. So, if you take the samples for each test from one state, as is usually done, than the results could not be compared among the members of diferent staes. However, if you could take the sample from several states, the results should be compared between these states. There is one problem considering the state which is known as cultural influence. The question whether the items could be choosen in a way that culture where people live are not influencing how . Than you can think of other possible generalziation of this problem, where people may live into the same country but be influenced by different things, or people who live in the distant countries but use internet may become one specific sample.

More about test you could read in Spearmans books, which are available on the internet. I would recommand you from several reasons, apart that I like them and find them very easily for reading. One of them is that he is one of the first who developed theories of the intelligence after which are made the first tests. I have also found, I think in one of his books, but I am not apsolutery sure, the referece towards Galton paper when he introduced normal curve. Unfortunately I have not yet found it, so if you, or someone else find this paper, I would like to ask you to send me if possible. And that paper would give you the full answer on your question (considering the Bell's curve)

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Tags: intelligence, publication-process
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title: Visual Cortex percentage

text:
# Question
Title: Visual Cortex percentage
Could somebody help please in providing some research papers or a resource book that states how much the visual cortex occupies of our cortex?

I am trying to find some reliable source but I couldn't find any other than one article mentioning it is 30%. But still I need to cite a reference.

# Answer
> 3 votes
As Bryan Krause indicates in the comments, the statement that *'One third of the cortical surface is dedicated to vision processing'* is disputable. Especially given that fact that there's evidence that even the primary visual cortex is involved in multimodal processing (MacPherson, 2018). Nonetheless, it is a valuable statement as it makes clear that a lot of our cortex *can* process visual stimuli and that it is an important sense for us.

If you need a reference for the one third statement, you can use Kupers & Ptito (2014) or (MacPherson, 2018). Note that these references are secondary literature, *i.e.*, they are not research papers where they actually calculated the cortical surface involved in visual processing.

Fig. 1. Functional areas of the cortex. Source: Boundless Physiology Textbook

**References**
**-** MacPherson, *Sensory Substitution and Augmentation*, Proceedings of the British Academy 2018
**-** Kupers & Ptito, *Neurosci Biobehav Rev* (2014); **41**: 36–52

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Tags: perception, reference-request, vision, brain
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# Question
Title: May somebody use oddball paradigm solely for psychophysical studies?
I'm an undergraduate linguistics student with a strong interest in cognitive psychology of visual attention. Nowadays, I'm studying on an undergraduate research project in which I'm planning to use reaction-time measurement and oddball presentation. However, when I dive into the oddball paradigm literature it seemed to me that it is only used with some other neuro-imaging techniques like EEG, fMRI etc. So I started to wonder if it is inappropriate to use oddball in order to elicit some behavioral data for some reason. Although I've searched for this on Google Scholar or Science Direct, I could not find anything directly related to this.

Is it uncommon / inappropriate / methodologically flawed to use the oddball paradigm only with reaction time? If so, why?

# Answer
> 1 votes
First off, I'm not an expert, but the oddball paradigm was initially developed for use in event-related potential (ERP) studies (basically EEG measures) (source: Wikipedia). Hence, because of historical reasons, you see this paradigm pop up especially in ERP studies. However, the task has been used in purely psychophysical experiments as well, without EEG or imaging (*e.g.*, Stockdale *et al*. (2011)).

<sub>**Reference**
**-** Stockdale *et al*., *Vis Res* (2011); **51**(11): 1232–8</sub>

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, methodology, psychophysics, reaction-time
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title: System 1 and unconsious

text:
# Question
Title: System 1 and unconsious
Kahneman (2011) apparently suggests there is system 1 and system 2 in decision making.

1. If I am not wrong he says system 1 is **more prone to error**s because it is automatic. **Is this correct assumption of mine?**

If yes, next question I have is: Is system1 related to unconcious? If yes, then isn't there a conflict between above assumption and this one:

> that unconscious thought (UT) is better at solving complex tasks, where many variables are considered, than conscious thought.

So if UT is related to System 1, then doesn't it contradict Kahnemans view that System 1 is more prone to errors (because if it is prone to errors according to Kahneman how is it better at decision making according to Wiki)? Needless to say there are articles which don't agree with wiki article I linked. This one for example: Acker (2008).

## References

Acker, F. (2008). New findings on unconscious versus conscious thought in decision making: Additional empirical data and meta-analysis. *Judgment and Decision Making, 3*(4), 292-303.

Kahneman, D. (2011). *Thinking, Fast and Slow*. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

# Answer
> 2 votes
You are correct in System 1 being more prone to errors as it relies on emotional experiences in the moment along with stereotypes and frequency of event.

System 2

> You wouldn’t expect someone to quickly ( in a matter of seconds ) spit out the answer to the question “calculate the mass of this (random) object” if the person has never experienced this object before.

System 1

> You would expect someone to apply the brake when they see a red light.

According to Kahneman (2011) System 1 is brought on by emotional experience and in the moment thought. This is a stronger and faster experience than that of which system 2 is capable of overriding. System 2 takes time to meditate a plan or course of action whereas system 1 is more of an immediate response. This delay in response would therefore suggest the latency between the workings of both systems.

This is of course my interpretation of his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” and has room for subjective debate.

He does provide wonderful examples pertaining to stock brokers and their tendency to follow the hype of the crowd and sell when it is often best to ride it out. I do not have the book currently on hand but will comment the reference when i have it.

## References

Kahneman, D. (2011). *Thinking, Fast and Slow*. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

# Answer
> 0 votes
Proneness to error is relative to the type of task.

If you have a task with a lot of variables, system 1 will (sometime) be less prone to error. It can integrate and process them in a parallel way. In this type of task, system 2 will not have enough time and ressources to process serially the same amount of information in the same time, so it will result in more errors.

However, system 1 has systematic bias due to heuristic processing, thus it will produce systematic errors confronted to certain type of problems (how many animals of each species moïse did take on the ark?). This specific class of problem will be more adequately handled by system 2, as it will carefully, sequentially consider each information, not being overwhelmed by their amount.

It is also noteworthy that this model (system 1 and 2) is hotly debated, seeming too simplistic. For example, it seems that intuitive processes (system 1) would also use logical rules, not only heuristics. cf this

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Tags: decision-making, consciousness, unconscious
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# Question
Title: What is the meaning of behaviorally oriented outside-in nature of therapy?
What is the meaning of behaviorally oriented outside-in nature of therapy? I am especially interested why this outside-in word was used but please provide me a wider context of this type of therapy. Especially as it is meant on the following page.

https://www.sheknows.com/health-and-wellness/articles/1126691/depression-treatment-behavioral-activation/

Could you possibly give some resources such as scholarly articles or book chapters where this method is used? My problem is that I am a non-expert on psychotherapy but need a starting point on the above issue. Thank you.

# Answer
> 1 votes
The concept of "outside-in" within the context of the article involves looking at how your environment is affecting your mental health. In other words, how the world around you (people you see, people you talk to...) is causing or worsening the depressive feelings and work on changing those things first.

There are a lot of articles online concerning Behavioural Activation, which is the form of behaviour therapy developed by Skinner discussed in the article you linked.

One meta-analysis (Cuijpers et al. 2007) found it very effective, and there are a couple of books on the subject.

* *Behavioral Activation for Depression: A Clinician's Guide* by Christopher R. Martell, Ruth Herman-Dunn, and Sona Dimidjian (2010)
* *Behavioral Activation: Distinctive Features* by Andrew M. Busch, Jonathan W. Kanter, and Laura C. Rusch (2009)

## References

Cuijpers, P., Van Straten, A., & Warmerdam, L. (2007). Behavioral activation treatments of depression: A meta-analysis. *Clinical psychology review, 27*(3), 318-326. doi: 10.1016/j.cpr.2006.11.001

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, depression, behaviorism
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# Question
Title: Kendrick et. al version of Maslow's Hierarchy
The above reinterpretation of the hierarchy by Kendrick et. al (2010) is straightforward enough. I am trying to see if there is any work done on generalizing the top portion there beyond peaking out at parenting e.g. mate acquisition-retention and parenting applied for life pursuits like academic or professional accomplishments. Maybe subject-acquisition-retention and progeny?

## References

Kenrick, D. T., Griskevicius, V., Neuberg, S. L., & Schaller, M. (2010). Renovating the Pyramid of Needs: Contemporary Extensions Built Upon Ancient Foundations. *Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 5*(3), 292–314. doi: 10.1177/1745691610369469

# Answer
> 1 votes
Peterson & Park (2010) provided a commentary on Kenrick et al (2010) whereby they pointed out that although the revision makes an important contribution by grounding the hierarchy in modern evolutionary thought, it may be premature to remove self-actualization from the hierarchy by reducing it to other needs associated with status and reproduction.

> We suggest that it is premature to jettison self-actualization from this revised version of Maslow’s hierarchy. We write from the perspective of positive psychology, which regards what is good in life to be as genuine as what is bad (Peterson & Park, 2003). What is good is not secondary, derivative, illusory, epiphenomenal, or otherwise suspect—at least until the data show otherwise. In their revision of Maslow’s hierarchy and their dismissal of self-actualization as a motive in its own right, Kenrick et al. seemed to reflect business-as-usual psychology by reducing what is good to something more mundane and perhaps not so good.
>
> However, Kenrick et al. mentioned positive psychology in their article and concluded that their evolutionary perspective is consistent with the view that human nature indeed has positive aspects. So, their revised pyramid may well accommodate the various emphases of positive psychology. And someday, if we take the pyramid metaphor literally, psychologists may follow the earlier examples of Egypt and Mexico and build several, including one that reflects Maslow’s (1971) deficiency needs and another one that reflects his growth needs.

It is important to note that Maslow's (1943, 1954) five-stage model was expanded to include cognitive and aesthetic needs (Maslow, 1970a) and later transcendence needs (Maslow, 1970b).

More can be read on that in an article by McLeod (2018).

So answering your question on generalizing the top portion of the pyramid by Kenrick et al. beyond peaking out at parenting may not be relevant as Maslow went beyond parenting with his expanded pyramid.

## References

Maslow, A. H. (1943). A Theory of Human Motivation. *Psychological Review, 50*(4), 370-96. doi: 10.1037/h0054346

Maslow, A. H. (1954). *Motivation and personality*. New York: Harper and Row.

Maslow, A. H. (1970a). *Motivation and personality*. New York: Harper & Row.

Maslow, A. H. (1970b). *Religions, values, and peak experiences*. New York: Penguin. (Original work published 1966)

McLeod, S. A. (2018). *Maslow's hierarchy of needs*. Retrieved from: https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html

Peterson, C., & Park, N. (2003). Positive psychology as the evenhanded positive psychologist views it. *Psychological Inquiry, 14*(2), 141–146. Retrieved from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1449822

Peterson, C., & Park, N. (2010). What happened to self-actualization? Commentary on Kenrick et al.(2010). Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5(3), 320-322. doi: 10.1177/1745691610369471

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, needs
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title: Taking Control of Your Dream

text:
# Question
Title: Taking Control of Your Dream
I experienced a weird situation a while back wherein I was dreaming hut was pretty sure I was in a dream and could control it to my wishes. I even had a break in my sleep and immediately went back to sleep and was again in the same situation. Can someone try to go in this state by planning or is it purely random?

# Answer
> 4 votes
The term for this phenomenon is "lucid dreaming". It is common to have some lucid dreaming experiences, but different people have different occurrence rates of lucid vs non-lucid dreams, and the level of "control" varies as well.

A previous SE Q&A addresses some of the possible influences on lucid dreaming including the potential to learn to have more lucid dreams as a skill.

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Tags: dreams, self-control
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title: EEG Signal quality

text:
# Question
Title: EEG Signal quality
I'm a EEG hobbyist using Olimex EEG SMT, and I'm using 4 dry, active electrodes to record EEG signals (the Olimex uses bipolar montage, so I actually have 2 channels). However, I cannot measure any waves apart from eye movement and hand/leg movement. I'm thinking of spending more money to improve my EEG setup but I don't know exactly why I'm getting this poor quality recordings.

Why I am not getting better results? Do I need conductive paste or do I need more channels? Would conductive paste improve my results? How much? Would more channels improve the signal together with signal processing?

# Answer
> 2 votes
Yes and sort of.

Dry electrodes are known for lesser signal quality in comparison to "wet" electrodes. Adding some paste/gel to dry electrodes does help. My professor just got an Emotive Insight and found that this helped quite a bit.

More electrodes does not automatically improve the channel to channel quality. However, more electrodes will allow you to measure activity on different locations more precisely. This may improve your ability to recognize different patterns and, therefore, more processes than blinks and movements. More channels will also improve the quality of Independent Component Analyses (ICA), a tool for recognizing and correcting artifacts.

I cannot tell you how much it will improve though. You can have a look at thesignal-to-noise ratio, but I don't know if you can actually calculate values, or that it only provides a theoretical idea/trend in improvement.

# Answer
> 0 votes
The number of channels are not the issue at all, its the electrodes that are at fault for your wrong readings. Dry electrodes/ water based electrodes have a much higher impedance when placed on your head. They record relatively good signals but require the user to be absolutely still, any slight movements and muscle/facial movements - even blinks can cause high frequency artifacts and distort your signal horrendously, which might be the reason that you are only viewing Eye blinks in your EEG. Gel based electrodes are the best but extremely irritating to use, the sticky feeling on your head after the experiment is done, is totally the worst.

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Tags: eeg
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# Question
Title: Are personality characteristics correlated with certain underlying features of the facial expressions of a person?
For instance is it possible to determine with some degree of accuracy if a person is ranks high in openness to new ideas by some photos of the person?

# Answer
> 1 votes
These studies investigated the abilities of participants to guess peoples' personalities from photos of their faces.

Extraverts' faces were judged as more extraverted by participants.

> Ian S. Penton-Voak, Nicholas Pound, Anthony C. Little, and David I. Perrett(2006). Personality Judgments from Natural and Composite Facial Images: More Evidence For A “Kernel Of Truth” In Social Perception. Social Cognition: Vol. 24, No. 5, pp. 607-640. https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2006.24.5.607

Participants performed better than chance at judging conscientiousness and agreeableness from composite faces.

> Little, A. C. and Perrett, D. I. (2007), Using composite images to assess accuracy in personality attribution to faces. British Journal of Psychology, 98: 111-126. https://doi.org/10.1348/000712606X109648

Participants could identify agreeableness, neuroticism and physical health from the faces.

> Jones, A. L., Kramer, R. S. S., and Ward, R. (2012). Signals of personality and health: the contributions of facial shape, skin texture, and viewing angle. J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 38, 1353–1361. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0027078

# Answer
> 1 votes
Сorrelation Big Five and with facial features (static photo)

Hu, S., Xiong, J., Fu, P., Qiao, L., Tan, J., Jin, L., & Tang, K. (2017). Signatures of personality on dense 3D facial images. Scientific Reports, 7(1), 73. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-00071-5

Penton-Voak, I. S., Pound, N., Little, A. C., & Perrett, D. I. (2006). Personality Judgments from Natural and Composite Facial Images: More Evidence For A “Kernel Of Truth” In Social Perception. Social Cognition, 24(5), 607–640. https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2006.24.5.607

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, neuroscience, personality
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# Question
Title: Is there a correlation between facial features and personality?
**Background:** From block buster movies, to Snow White and the Seven Dwarf's, characters with certain personality and mental traits are portrayed looking a certain way. For example, the clumsy one has big ears or the antagonist has dark hair and the protagonist has a strong jaw line. These characteristics seem to be pretty consistent over time and in different types of media.

Do facial/body features shape the brain or does the brain shape the body or are they completely separate with no connection?

**Question: Is there a correlation between facial features and personality?**

# Answer
## Inheritability of facial features

Let's start with the origin of specific facial features. Below is a table which shows averaged heritabilities for a range of facial quantitative traits from a large number of studies, from the review by Kohn (1991):

where $h^2$ is the narrow-sense heritability. You can clearly see that heritability in the majority of the features is well above 0.5, in fact the overall mean from all the features is 0.72 (with standard deviation 0.18). To put it in the context, this review shows that facial features are typically more heritable than behavioural traits (usually less then 0.50), but less heritable than the height (0.8-0.9). At this point we can conclude that **a substantial part of the variability in facial features can be explained by the inheritance (i.e. genetic factors).**

## Cognitive aspects of physiognomy

As @Xurtio pointed out, physiognomy gained and lost popularity several times in history. In general, modern science is sceptical towards the traditional approach to physiognomy (i.e. specific facial features correlate with objective personality traits). However, there is a strong interest in **attribution of personality traits to specific facial features**. Hassin and Trope (2000) conducted a number of experiments examining the cognitive aspects of physiognomy. In examining "reading from faces" authors demonstrated that **physiognomic information changes the interpretation of verbal information**. The more ambiguous this information is, the more perceivers use the face. Furthermore, even when asked to, participants were unable to ignore people's faces while simulating decisions regarding personnel selection, although they are quite sure that they are able to do so (Hassin and Trope, 2000). Finally, **physiognomic information makes us highly overconfident about our judgments** \- our confidence in physiognomy-based judgments far exceeds the actual accuracy of these judgments.

We all know that face is powerful information channel that is used to communicate a broad spectrum of emotions, more or less universally across cultures (Ekman et al., 1971). We also have dedicated brain areas specialised in decoding facial information, for example Face Fusiform Area (FFA) that contributes to facial recognition (Sergent et al., 1992). It is therefore not surprising that we all attribute so much to the specific facial features. And that **we are biased in making personality judgements based on facial features**, as showed by Hassin and Trope (2000).

Regarding the direct correlation between facial features and objective personality traits, there are no systematic empirical studies that support such links (as for September 2015).

**References**

Kohn, L. A. P. (1991) The Role of Genetics in Craniofacial Morphology and Growth. *Annual Review of Anthropology* 20, 261-278.

Hassin, R., Trope, Y. (2000) Facing faces: Studies on the cognitive aspects of physiognomy. *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology*, 78, 5, 837-852.

Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1971). Constants across cultures in the face and emotion. *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology*, 17(2), 124–129.

Sergent, J., Ohta, S., MacDonald, B. (1992) Functional neuroanatomy of face and object processing. A positron emission tomography study. *Brain* 115, 1, 15–36.
> 9 votes

# Answer
Paul Ekman has shown definite links between emotions and facial expressions. A Google Scholar search for his name returns many many results.

Now, consider how muscles are physically formed; that is, the more we use muscles, the better defined (and usually either stronger or more effective) they become. Alternatively put, form follows function.

Put the two concepts together: over time, facial expressions create a muscular structure reflecting the most commonly created facial expressions. This would be true whether or not the expressions were emotionally-generated or self-generated (smiling because of joy or just self-creating a Duchenne smile).

So, partially the answer would appear to be yes; some degree of facial structure could be correlated with personality.

However, it's less certain whether or not other facial features correlate with personality. Non-modifiable structures such as bone structure and placement in particular.

Furthermore, one must consider the personality expectations others hold in regard to facial features (related to the study posted in the comments). If we *expect* someone to be a particular personality because of a particular characteristic, do we interpret and attribute their actions differently? Could we potentially affect another's actions based on these expectations? Over time do these social expectations, based on a person's physical appearance, alter that person's personality? To what degree?

I suspect that your question does not have one simple answer, and may not have the same answer depending on who you examine.

> 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul\_Ekman
> 2. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=paul+ekman
> 3. http://www.jappl.org/content/88/3/1127.full
> 5 votes

# Answer
Here are some recent papers about the links between face and behavior:

1. Kramer, R. S. S., King, J. E. & Ward, R. Identifying personality from the static, nonexpressive face in humans and chimpanzees: Evidence of a shared system for signaling personality. Evol. Hum. Behav. DOI: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2010.10.005 (2011).
2. Walker, M. & Vetter, T. Changing the personality of a face: Perceived big two and big five personality factors modeled in real photographs. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 110, 609–624 (2016).
3. Kramer, R. S. S. & Ward, R. Internal facial features are signals of personality and health. Q. J. Exp. Psychol. 63, 2273–2287 (2010).
4. Lewis, G. J., Lefevre, C. E. & Bates, T. Facial width-to-height ratio predicts achievement drive in US presidents. Pers. Individ. Dif. 52, 855–857 (2012).
5. Haselhuhn, M. P. & Wong, E. M. Bad to the bone: facial structure predicts unethical behaviour. Proc. R. Soc. B Biol. Sci. 279, 571 LP-576 (2012).
6. Valentine, K. A., Li, N. P., Penke, L. & Perrett, D. I. Judging a Man by the Width of His Face: The Role of Facial Ratios and Dominance in Mate Choice at Speed-Dating Events. Psychol. Sci. 25, (2014).
7. Carre, J. M. & McCormick, C. M. In your face: facial metrics predict aggressive behaviour in the laboratory and in varsity and professional hockey players. Proc. R. Soc. B Biol. Sci. 275, 2651–2656 (2008).
8. Haselhuhn, M. P., Ormiston, M. E. & Wong, E. M. Men’s Facial Width-to-Height Ratio Predicts Aggression: A Meta-Analysis. PLoS One 10, e0122637 (2015).
9. Lefevre, C. E., Etchells, P. J., Howell, E. C., Clark, A. P. & Penton-Voak, I. S. Facial width-to-height ratio predicts self-reported dominance and aggression in males and females, but a measure of masculinity does not. Biol. Lett. 10, (2014).
10. Welker, K. M., Goetz, S. M. M. & Carré, J. M. Perceived and experimentally manipulated status moderates the relationship between facial structure and risk-taking. Evol. Hum. Behav. DOI: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2015.03.006 (2015).
11. Hu, S. et al. Signatures of personality on dense 3D facial images. Sci. Rep. 7, 73 (2017).
12. Borkenau, P., Brecke, S., Möttig, C. & Paelecke, M. Extraversion is accurately perceived after a 50-ms exposure to a face. J. Res. Pers. 43, 703–706 (2009).
13. Little, A. C. & Perrett, D. I. Using composite images to assess accuracy in personality attribution to faces. Br. J. Psychol. 98, 111–126 (2007).
14. Walker, M., Schönborn, S., Greifeneder, R. & Vetter, T. The basel face database: A validated set of photographs reflecting systematic differences in big two and big five personality dimensions. PLoS One 13, (2018).
15. Qiu, L., Lu, J., Yang, S., Qu, W. & Zhu, T. What does your selfie say about you? Comput. Human Behav. 52, 443–449 (2015).
16. Wang, Y. & Kosinski, M. Deep neural networks are more accurate than humans at detecting sexual orientation from facial images. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. DOI: 10.1037/pspa0000098 (2018).
> 1 votes

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Tags: personality, physiology
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# Question
Title: Can a sequence of "automatic" tasks be seen in an EEG?
Say I train a task that consists of a sequence of smaller events a 1000 times such that it becomes an automatic/subconscious (something like muscle memory) movement. Then when I view the EEG signal during this automatic task (assuming this task consists of 3 small events) will I be able to see/decode instances of the second and third event once the first event is finished by the user?
It is basically sequential decoding of future automatic events.

# Answer
> 1 votes
The basic answer is that it depends on:

* training protocol (duration, frequency)
* modality (hearing, seeing, memorizing, attention, etc)
* individual variance (observable changes varies between individuals - some may not respond to the training)

So it has to be determined individually for each task (not enough information provided in the original question). In other words, it is an empirical question, which means that the answer lies in the results of an experiment - ”we have to check”.

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Tags: eeg, unconscious, automaticity
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# Question
Title: Is there a list of large-scale, free datasets with psychological variables?
Psychologists are not using large, existing, free data to its potential. We don't know what exists, what it contains, or how to use it without a huge investment. Secondary analysis of large, open datasets can improve replicability and reproducibility over small new studies, e.g., through accessibility, high power, generalizability, and validated measures. Between-subjects moderation designs particularly lack power. However, these resources are underused in research and education. Student research often has low inference quality, and educators may lack access to use these tools for pedagogy.

Is there a list of large-scale, free datasets with psychological variables? Additionally, is there a list of other such lists?

Related: Psychological journal that focuses on publishing interesting psychological datasets

# Answer
Participants at the last meeting of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science developed a list of \>100 such datasets with some metadata such as topic, country, total number of participants, etc. The list is currently a collaborative wiki open to editing by anyone.

# List of open psychology datasets and aggregators

Outside of psychology, there are a vast amount of aggregators. Here are two major resources:

https://www.quora.com/Data/Where-can-I-find-large-datasets-open-to-the-public

https://toolbox.google.com/datasetsearch
> 5 votes

# Answer
Here this question on the psychology & neuro exchange has several cognitive test datasets.

Online data repository of research in the cognitive sciences
> 3 votes

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Tags: measurement, methodology, data
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# Question
Title: Proportion of cortex dedicated for vision and hearing
I have read in some websites that the percentage of the cortex devoted to processing visual information is from 30-66% with some claiming even 90%. And compared to that, only about 3% is dedicated to hearing.

Is this true?

The only source I've found stating something similar is from Sells & Fixott (1957) where 50% of the neural tissue is devoted to vision and almost two-thirds of the electrical activity of the brain is devoted to vision when the eyes are open.

I haven't found anything related to hearing though. Does anyone know of a paper where this is discussed?

**References**

Sells, S.B. & Fixott, R. S. (1957). Evaluation of Research on Effects of Visual Training on Visual Functions. *American Journal of Ophthalmology* 44(2), 230—236
DOI: 10.1016/0002-9394(57)90012-0

# Answer
> 3 votes
1. 20-30% vision. See Sheth & Young (2016) which cites Van Essen (2003).
2. 27% vision, 8% auditory (Van Essen, 2003)
3. I have seen some earlier references that say 50%. I think this derives from two factors. First, it is 50% in Macaque (see above ref 1). Second, my feeling (I haven't dug into this in enough detail to conclusively state it, so please don't quote me on this!) is that earlier studies on humans were more speculative and tended to follow that 50% as a best guess in absence of direct measurements.
4. As some of the above answers point out, one needs to be careful in defining what part of the brain and what vision means. If one were to include the subcortical structures (i.e., amygdala, superior colliculus, pulvina, LGN) the estimate of total brain (not just the cerebrum cortex) would be different.

<sub> Sheth, B. R., & Young, R. (2016). Two visual pathways in primates based on sampling of space: exploitation and exploration of visual information. Frontiers in integrative neuroscience, 10, 37.
Van Essen, D. C. (2003). Organization of visual areas in macaque and human cerebral cortex. The visual neurosciences, 1, 507-521. </sub>

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Tags: vision, brain, hearing
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# Question
Title: Is the hippocampus responsible for storing or creating memories?
I've heard that severe damage to the hippocampus results in the inability to form new memories but still remember old ones. Am I mistaking something? Is the hippocampus responsible for storing memories, creating memories or both?

# Answer
It's fair to say storing new memories is an important function of the hippocampus. The most famous example is the case of HM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry\_Molaison, possibly that's where you heard this?

The hippocampus is also heavily involved in navigation, so memory is not the only thing it does, and there are memory systems that don't seem to involve the hippocampus (for example, working memory and motor skill learning. There's some ongoing discussion around how best to classify different kinds of memory, to be able to say more specifically which kinds belong to this hippocampus system). So as always, the story is complicated. But HM's story shows that "severe damage to the hippocampus can result in the inability to form new memories, but still leave old ones intact" is a fair-enough claim.
> -2 votes

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Tags: neuroscience, hippocampus
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# Question
Title: How do you denoise and extract features from EEG data with Python?
I have EEG data with 5 columns (1 per each electrode) and I need to denoise it and extract features from it using Python. I tried to find relevant packages but my search kept leading me to MNE which takes as input data in a format that I don't have. My data is in a pandas dataframe.

my questions are:

1. How do you denoise such dataset?
2. How do you do feature extraction for it?

Thanks :)

# Answer
> 1 votes
you can convert your data frame to numpy array using

```
data=df.to_numpy()

```

If your data is single trial meanining two dimensional dataset, you can use

```
channel_names=df.columns.tolist()
channel_types=len(channel_names)*['eeg']
sfreq = 1000  # in Hertz
montage = 'standard_1005'
info = mne.create_info(channel_names, sfreq, channel_types, montage)
raw = mne.io.RawArray(data, info)

```

If you have multitrials dataset

```
channel_names=df.columns.tolist()
channel_types=len(channel_names)*['eeg']
sfreq = 1000  # in Hertz
montage = 'standard_1005'
info = mne.create_info(channel_names, sfreq, channel_types, montage)
data=data.reshape(len(channel_names),-1,sfreq*time)
data=np.swapaxes(data,0,1)
epochs = mne.EpochsArray(sub, info)

```

Once you convert your dataset to mne structure, you can use mne filters and mne features

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Tags: eeg, neurology
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title: How much we should trust our brain

text:
# Question
Title: How much we should trust our brain
Our brain is trained from culture and environment that we're raised in. So we don't control what we're learning until we get to teenage. But by that time our behaviour is already been shaped. This shapes our intuition part.

Also we can't be rational because we know so very less, how can a person take rational decision in constraint partially observable space. This shapes our analytical part.

So my question is how much we should trust our brain ? Neither intuitive nor analytical part is controlled by us !

# Answer
Firstly not trusting the brain in itself does more harm than good, as it gives way to paranoia and anxiety, and serves to be a very unhealthy mental disaster.

Secondly, there is much more to decision making in the brain than just intuition and the analytical part of function, as factors such as personality, perception stemming from the frontal , and gathered experiences and learned memory from the hippocampus work together as well and much more as the brain works in an integrated manner interlinking both conscious and subconscious aspects of the brain. But what the brain does best is learn from experiences, and it keeps doing so and the best way to maintaining a healthy life is to have a healthy brain, and a healthy brain demands trust and constant learning.

Thirdly recent evidences based on research suggest that the prefrontal cortex continues to get developed and shaped even until a person hits his 30’s while the other parts of brain continue to grow and develop which is where neuroplasticity also finds its role through out our life(Hötting & Röder, 2013).

If you guys want to further understand my comprehension,refer to this article, hope it was helpful:). **Reference : Hötting, K., & Röder, B. (2013). Beneficial effects of physical exercise on neuroplasticity and cognition. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 37(9), 2243-2257. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2013.04.005 Mullally, S., & Maguire, E. (2013). Memory, Imagination, and Predicting the Future. The Neuroscientist, 20(3), 220-234. doi: 10.1177/1073858413495091**
> 2 votes

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Tags: neuroscience, cognitive-neuroscience
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title: An Example of Negative Reinforcement?

text:
# Question
Title: An Example of Negative Reinforcement?
In trying to understand the origins of test anxiety, a thought came up.

> Consider an individual who has in the past performed badly in university assessment tasks. In an attempt to do better academically, the individual negatively reinforces unattainably high expectations to avoid any future feelings of inadequacy.

Have I used the idea of negative reinforcement correctly in this instance? I have been taught the fundamental ideas of reinforcement and punishment as described by Skinner.

Thanks :)

# Answer
> 3 votes
Based on the scenario you mentioned, it resembles more as Learned Helplessness or Self-Fulfilling prophecy than negative reinforcement.

Learned Helplessness,is a belief that an individual could not make a change to the outcome after being exposed to the aversive stimuli for a number of times (Seligman, 1972).To the point where he/she stop attempting to address the issue as they thought it is inevitable. As an example: a person who failed multiple times for a subject despite constant revision eventually stop trying to take the test because he/she thinks that their effort is "pointless" and do not bother about it anymore since he/she believed their failure is unavoidable.

Self-fulfilling prophecy,is a phenomena when a prediction of an outcome of a situation (directly/indirectly) becomes a reality due to the inclination on false belief of the individual (Madon, Willard,Guyll & Scherr, 2011). Example, if a person thinks he/she is not good in Mathematics and continues to think or feel such way, he/she will likely to fail in an upcoming test. Although the person might not have failed the test, just because of the belief that he/she is terrible at math,which discourage the person to even make an effort to practice and study. Thus, making the individual's statement of "terrible at maths" true.

As for Negative Reinforcement, is when a stimulus that is deemed unpleasant to the individual is removed to increase the possibilities of the behaviour to occur in the future (Skinner, 1953).

In order to better explain negative reinforcement, an example: a teacher decided to cancelled additional classes (removed the unpleasant stimulus) to an individual when he/she did well in exams (increased the likelihood of a behaviour to occur).

Unpleasant stimulus: Additional Class

Behavior to reinforce: Maintains academic grades

References:

Madon, S., Willard, J., Guyll, M., & Scherr, K. C. (2011). Self-fulfilling prophecies: Mechanisms, power, and links to social problems. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 5(8), 578-590. doi:10.1111/j.1751-9004.2011.00375.x

Seligman, M. E. (1972). Learned helplessness. Annual review of medicine, 23, 407-412. doi:https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.me.23.020172.002203

Skinner, B. F. (1953). Science and human behaviour. New York: Macmillan.

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, anxiety
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# Question
Title: How can we know which types of brainwaves is dominated at particular state?
I am a freshman at Neuroscience.

As I learned there are 5 types of brainwaves: Gamma, Beta, Alpha, Theta and Delta, each types have a different frequency range. So my question is when onserving a brainwaves at particular state how we know which types of brainwaves is dominated from each other? (Does it change amplitude or it change frequency).

And if it change amplitude, is there any ways can I know what is maximum and minimum range of amplitude of each types of brainwaves.

Thank you very much.

# Answer
See a previous Q&A: Why do brains oscillate within specific frequency ranges?

I think that answer covers much of your question; I'll try to cover the rest here. In short, the names gamma/beta/alpha/theta/delta are just that: names of parts of a spectrum, just like colors red/green/blue. "Alpha waves" aren't necessarily a real, discrete thing, it's just a name given to oscillations in a particular frequency band which may or may not be due to a "real" oscillation: even a random system produces waves of many frequencies.

The power spectrum of noise in the brain is typically "pink" which means it falls off with ~1/f or 1/f2.

To see "real" elevations in a power spectrum, you need to plot the whole spectrum and look for "bumps." I just grabbed one from a random paper, and although I don't like how these data are plotted without a log scale, it does show peaks in the spectrum nicely:

> Image adapted from Cajochen et al 1995; annotations mine.

As far as the amplitude of these "waves" - that entirely depends on your recording system, skull geometry, and other technical issues specific to a particular recording: the actual amplitude in volts is not really important. Therefore, typically one normalizes the power spectrum and either compare across conditions in a recording (that is, keeping the recording system constant and looking at different epochs), or normalizes the entire spectrum to "total power" to compare between recordings.

It almost never make sense to compare power in different frequency bands, though, in saying whether a frequency is "dominant": there is no meaning to delta being higher than beta, for example, besides the power law relationship where power is almost always higher at lower frequencies (except for extreme cases like the alpha peaks in the image above). What is relevant, however, could be when "in condition A, delta is higher than delta in condition B, and beta in condition A is lower than beta in condition B": relative comparisons are key. The exception is when you have prominent peaks, like in the image above.

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Cajochen, C., Brunner, D. P., Krauchi, K., Graw, P., & Wirz-Justice, A. (1995). Power density in theta/alpha frequencies of the waking EEG progressively increases during sustained wakefulness. Sleep, 18(10), 890-894.
> 1 votes

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Tags: neuroscience, brain-waves
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# Question
Title: Childhood IQ and pattern of drug use in adulthood
A study by White et al. (2012) using a large UK sample concludes that

> In this cohort, high childhood IQ was related to illegal drug use in adulthood.

Note that this does not refer to habitual use, but to have ever having tried illegal drugs:

> Preliminary analyses revealed that, at the 42-year follow-up, the use of drugs in the past 12 months was rare \[...\] We therefore used assessments of the lifetime prevalence.

The same paper of White cites another UK study Batty et al. (2007) in which *regular* smoking and *heavy* alcohol consumption ware negatively correlated with childhood IQ.

Is this type of finding, namely positive correlation of IQ with what I'd call experimental drug use \[I think the medical term is drug abuse\], but negative correlation of IQ with heavy/regular use \[which I think is called dependency or addiction\] generalizable across countries? Or \[if this is far too ambitious to ask\] at least reproducible in other countries?

And if so, are there other confounding variables that might explain some of it better, e.g. openness to experience for ever having tried an illegal drug?

# Answer
> 3 votes
First, thank you bringing that White et al. (2009) paper to my attention -- I am currently accumulating a whole bunch of cohort studies focusing on cognitive epidemiology, or health outcomes associated with cognitive ability. Here I will share with you some of what I have collected so far with respect to drug-related outcomes.

> Is this type of finding, namely positive correlation of IQ with what I'd call experimental drug use \[I think the medical term is drug abuse\],

To my understanding, I do hear about similar findings from time to time, but this isn't where the research funding goes. You tend not to get research grants unless you can sell drugs = death and destruction.

> negative correlation of IQ with \[...\] dependency

Yes, this is generally the case. Dependency, and other adverse health outcomes resulting from said depedency. Moreover, the relationship tends to be non-linear. The following data is from a cohort study of 1 million Swedish conscripts, with the health outcomes being the risk for hospital admission for various disorders including alcohol-related disorders and other substance-related disorders as a function of childhood intelligence. Obviously, the use of a hospital admission endpoint means that the disorder was on the more serious end of the disorder:

Gale, C. R., Batty, G. D., Tynelius, P., Deary, I. J., & Rasmussen, F. (2010). Intelligence in Early Adulthood and Subsequent Hospitalization for Mental Disorders. Epidemiology, 21(1), 70–77. https://doi.org/10.1097/EDE.0b013e3181c17da8

Here's another one of a similar vein. This cohort study comprised 1.4 million Swedes, looking at "substance-misuse events" as a function of stanines (this is a way of grouping your cohort into nine groups, each comprising a 1 SD increment in ability).

How these guys defined "substance-misuse events" does warrant further clarification, however:

> Substance misuse events were assessed with an omnibus measure combining information about alcohol- and drug- related criminal convictions, medical treatments and deaths. This measure, which has been used previously \[10,26,27\], captures a wide range of alcohol and drug re- lated negative outcomes but does not include all individ- uals with substance abuse, as many substance abusers are not registered in any medical or governmental registry.

Again, you see that the risk is greatest in the the stanine with the lowest cognitive ability (estimated IQ \<74), and the curve is non-linear:

Latvala, A., Kuja-Halkola, R., D’Onofrio, B. M., Larsson, H., & Lichtenstein, P. (2016). Cognitive ability and risk for substance misuse in men: genetic and environmental correlations in a longitudinal nation-wide family study. Addiction, 111(10), 1814–1822. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.13440

And last, but not least, some mortality data, again from the Swedes (n = 50,000). This one doesn't examine cognitive ability, but demonstrates that substance abuse and dependency, particularly in adolescence, seems to be a mediating factor in injury-related mortality. We also note that alcohol abuse as an adult also represents a significant risk:

Stenbacka, M., Leifman, A., Dalal, K., & Jansson, B. (2011). Early predictors of injury mortality among Swedish conscripts: A 35-year cohort study. Accident Analysis and Prevention, 43(1), 228–234. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aap.2010.08.014

> generalizable across countries? Or \[if this is far too ambitious to ask\] at least reproducible in other countries?

As you can tell, the best data seems to come from the Scandinavian countries... no prizes for which country ranks #1. The whole problem with these sorts of studies is that you need to be organised and preferably have national conscription, meaning its simply untenable for most Western countries.

However, if you dig around, the best studies will come from the Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians. And to a lesser extent, the Scots followed by perhaps the Unites States.

> And if so, are there other confounding variables that might explain some of it better, e.g. openness to experience for ever having tried an illegal drug?

Good question. Perhaps high cognitive ability results in greater disposable income? Most of the drugs reported are reminiscent of the substances you would find floating around a nightclub, where people are queuing up at the toilets in order to snort lines of coke off a toilet seat. And amyl nitrite is very much a gay party scene drug. However, we also note that even after controlling for adult SES, the effect is attenuated but still remains.

Who knows -- perhaps getting totally fucking high from time to time is part of the normative human experience, while those with lower cognitive ability are too busy drinking the bad thoughts away with alcohol. It is, nevertheless, a great find :p

# Answer
> 3 votes
I don't know how reproducible those findings are, but this study (Schretlen, van der Hulst, Pearlson, & Gordon, 2010) found a moderate association between fluid intelligence and openness to experience:

> The two separate samples yielded strikingly similar associations between trait Openness and cognitive test performance. In both samples, Openness showed strong positive correlations with Gc, intermediate correlations with Gf and fluency, and relatively weak correlations with executive functioning.

If we add to that the claim that the use of certain drugs is positively correlated to openness to experience, then we have some support for your idea of this trait as a confounding variable in your study results.

However, we should also keep in mind that drug use itself may influence openness to experience (MacLean et al, 2011), which should complicate things further.

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Tags: intelligence, addiction, drugs
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# Question
Title: Why does human mind tend to understand everything in terms of duality or binary states rather than continuum of states?
We can understand things much quickly when things are defined as a duality. Like good and bad, happy and sad, positive and negative, slow and fast etc. When two things are distinguishable distinctly the human mind tends to grasp it more easily versus defining it on continuum scale or having more than two states. Duality is the most easily understood phenomenon of human mind. That's why most classification happens on these lines despite the existence of a continuum of states.

# Answer
There are many reasons why people tend to understand things in dualistic ways, but I'll mention two:

**In the realm of inference** (e.g., judging what is true, forming predictions), having mature schema for each end of a spectrum (e.g., one for introverts and one for extroverts) allows you to infer what positions between the two extremes might look like with adequate levels of accuracy. So, if you have developed schema for the ends of the extroversion spectrum, you can infer what a moderately extroverted person would be like *without actually needing to store a third schema for a moderately extroverted person in memory*. In other words, a dualistic understanding allows you to form schema for points between the extremes on the fly when you need it (sometimes called *interpolation*). It isn't a system that's free of the risk of error, but its easy to see how it is extremely efficient from a computational perspective in a world where agents don't need perfect mental models.

**In the realm of decision-making**, its important to consider the nature of what a decision actually is. While information and judgments might rest on spectra (e.g., the degree of attraction felt for a dating partner, strength of a preference for a political candidate) the actual *decisions* that are informed by these judgments are often discrete. For example, you can't "kinda" marry or "kinda" vote for someone. You either choose him/her or you don't. You can only express one behavior at a time. What this means is that information and judgments which fall on spectra often need to be *converted* into yes/no decisions. For example, when choosing which of five schools to attend for college, you're actually trying to convert a plethora of continuous information (e.g., benefits and costs of each school) into five yes/no values (specifically, one "yes" and four "nos").

This is such a ubiquitous phenomenon in decision-making that I don't think its surprising that people naturally tend to use binary language to speak about things which exist on continua. That said, its important to point out that people *don't* always reduce topics they care about to binary categories. In many cases, people will share their *ambiguity* or *ambivalence* with trusted friends when they are having a hard time converting continuous information into discrete decisions. Pay attention the next time a friend opens up about something difficult and you'll notice that their language often demonstrates nuance and awareness of grey areas.

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The paper cited below is an excellent discussion of the relationship between continuous information and discrete judgments and the reference section is packed full of papers that go into much more detail than I'm able to accomplish here.

Luan, S., Schooler, L. J., & Gigerenzer, G. (2014). From perception to preference and on to inference: An approach–avoidance analysis of thresholds. Psychological Review, 121(3), 501. (link to PDF)
> 1 votes

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Tags: perception, theory-of-mind
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# Question
Title: How are the outputs of neurons encoded, if at all?
The way I learned it, a neuron fires with a fixed amplitude, and the only information encoded in the output is the frequency at which it fires. 10 spikes per second is in some sense a 'stronger' signal than 5 spikes per second.

But from a computational point of view this seems absurd. It makes the output of a neuron little more than the encoding of an analog voltage level. What a waste of a channel!

What I am looking for is research work done on analysing neuronal spike trains for the kind of information that might be found on a digital channel. There might be a pattern of spikes to represent a particular sensation or action, with certain patterns repeated at intervals. Or some such.

Does any such work exist, either confirming or refuting this idea?

# Answer
> 4 votes
The concept of digital channels of information flow is a serial-processing biased view of information: it applies a lot to serial systems like computers (which are still serial even with multiple "cores" since each operates independently of the other), but does not apply in the same way to massively parallel systems like the nervous system except perhaps to some very of the very low-level sensory information.

However, temporal coding has been a very active area of research. There are many different time scales on which neurons can potentially carry timing information. However, a digital bit stream is probably the least efficient one so you won't find much from neuroscience suggesting that type of pattern.

**External timing is very important**

Even given a very simple "analog-ish" neural code, where firing rates indicate some intensity of signal (for example, the tension on a tendon), there is also key temporal information to carry: the tension is happening *now*. It is not on a stack to be processed and conveyed in the most efficient encoding possible, it is happening presently, and the neuronal signal has to encode not just *how much* but also that it is occurring *now*: rate codes can do this to a fairly high precision.

Neuronal firing is a bit like a Geiger counter: the intensity is indicated by the rate of clicks, but there is a ton of additional information based on when those clicks occur. For example, as you move a Geiger counter nearer to a radiation source, the click rate increases dramatically. Any code that is more complex would introduce delays, and those delays necessarily result in a loss of temporal information.

**Phase coding**

Within the brain, there are definitely cases where temporal information is important to neural codes. The brain handles more complex information that changes over longer time scales than in the periphery, so it is possible to degrade temporal information to allow for deeper encoding schemes that combine generative models of the outside world with abstracted sensory information.

In particular, one can look at *phase coding* where neurons fire at a particular phase of an ongoing oscillation (Montemurro et al, 2008; Kayser et al, 2009). You could perhaps think of the ongoing oscillation as a "timing bit" because it provides a synchronizing point for relative timing of spikes.

In the hippocampus, phase coding is important for reconstruction of position information from neural spiking activity (O'Keefe et al, 1993; Jensen and Lisman, 2000).

**Ensemble coding**

Imagine a cortical neuron fires up to 100 Hz. You could digitize a signal by looking at spike/no spike within 10 ms bins, so every 10 ms you have 1 bit of information per neuron. Take an ensemble of 100 independent neurons, and you have 100 bits per 10 ms or 10,000 bits per second.

However, if you instead of 100 members of an ensemble, each 10 ms encodes not 1 * 100 bits, but 2^100 which is on the order of 1030 patterns every 10 ms. And this is without assuming a more complex temporal code where the order of firing within a brief window matters (Abeles et al, 1993).

There is good evidence that overlapping cell assemblies/ensembles exist (see for example Harris, 2005 for review) such that at any moment in time, the high-dimensional activity over the space of many neurons carries information, for example about the current sensory state.

Given that there are billions of neurons in a brain, ensemble coding makes bit rate not itself a limiting factor, though other constraints seem to make phase coding and other types of temporal info

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Abeles, M., Bergman, H., Margalit, E., & Vaadia, E. (1993). Spatiotemporal firing patterns in the frontal cortex of behaving monkeys. Journal of neurophysiology, 70(4), 1629-1638.

Harris, K. D. (2005). Neural signatures of cell assembly organization. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 6(5), 399.

Jensen, O., & Lisman, J. E. (2000). Position reconstruction from an ensemble of hippocampal place cells: contribution of theta phase coding. Journal of neurophysiology, 83(5), 2602-2609.

Kayser, C., Montemurro, M. A., Logothetis, N. K., & Panzeri, S. (2009). Spike-phase coding boosts and stabilizes information carried by spatial and temporal spike patterns. Neuron, 61(4), 597-608.

Montemurro, M. A., Rasch, M. J., Murayama, Y., Logothetis, N. K., & Panzeri, S. (2008). Phase-of-firing coding of natural visual stimuli in primary visual cortex. Current biology, 18(5), 375-380.

O'Keefe, J., & Recce, M. L. (1993). Phase relationship between hippocampal place units and the EEG theta rhythm. Hippocampus, 3(3), 317-330.

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Tags: computational-modeling
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# Question
Title: The strange shape of the temporal generalization map
We are plotting the temporal generalization map (binary decoding) using EEG signal, but we obtained a strange result and don’t know how to interpret it. First, after bandpass filter (8-12 Hz), we could obtain a normal result as below.  As shown in time-course, the classifying values (thick black lines) between red line (first condition) and blue line (second condition) are variable along the time, so that the values in the early time do not easily apply to the late time leading to the normal map of the temporal generalization.

However, using higher frequency band (12-30 Hz) we encountered a strange result  In this case, the classifying values between red line (first condition) and blue line (second condition) are somewhat constant along the time, so that the values in the early time easily apply to the late time leading to the high decoding accuracy all over the map. The point is that two parallel curves are easily divided by a simple mean (black thick line) between two curves as the classifier. If two curves are not parallel but mixed with each other, the decoding accuracies over the map of the temporal generalization should be low, and we can conclude that the high frequency do not contain decodable information.

Questions, 1. Have you ever seen this type of time-courses of the high frequencies in our result and this strange map the temporal generalization and? 2. We use the matlab function ‘filtfilt.m’ for bandpass filter, could you recommend other function for bandpass filter?

# Answer
I am unsure to what your paradigm exactly does, but as to your frequency bands a layman's interpretation would be as shown in Table 1. Hence, the frequency bands you investigate could simply be different, because the states associated with them are different.

As to your band filter - the best thing to do is find the rock stars in your field and copy their methods. The filtfilt function in matlab is excellent, as it is a zero-phase digital filter. It will depend on the filter order, however, if the outcome will make any sense. Too low of an order may generate overlap between bands, too high orders may introduce artifacts. But by the looks of it, none is happening here, but I can't be sure and you need to verify yourself.

Table 1. Simplified overview of the EEG bands and their characteristics. source: New Dawn Magazine
> 1 votes

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Tags: eeg
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# Question
Title: In "The Great Hack", what are the data points used in psychological profiling?
I just saw the documentary "The Great Hack" (2019) about Cambridge Analytica. In it, they were talking about “data points” to profile people to better target them and persuade them into voting a certain way. I think they needed around 5000-6000 data points to achieve the claimed outcome.

Could anyone give an example of what a “data point” is in this case?

# Answer
The 'data points' were collected by Cambridge Analytica through an app developed by Dr Aleksandr Kogan. The app was a personality quiz called This is Your Digital Life and was run on Facebook. It collected all kinds of data, including 'likes', birthdays and locations. So it was those kind of data points where Cambridge Analytica was bragging about. It claimed that it had up to 5000 data points on every US voter.
> 1 votes

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Tags: social-psychology, perception, personality
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# Question
Title: How does our brain allow us to commit suicide?
How does our brain allow us to commit suicide? Our brain and everything in our body has developed to ensure our survival. At the prospect of a threat to our life, our brain does everything to save us with all those reflexes. In spite of this, some people are capable of committing suicide, how is this possible? Lets consider a scenario,

> A person commits suicide in anticipation of being insulted.

In this case, being insulted is clearly better than compromising our survival.Everything we do is primarily for our survival. While suiciding, one has to go against all of his instincts that were hard wired into him. Again, if one has the will power to commit suicide, one should be able to endure any other difficulty in life, this is also contradictory. Please explain.

# Answer
The survival instinct is not the only drive that decides whether or not a person will choose to continue or end his/her life. Other instincts that have been evolved to increase the survival chance of a clan/species, such as the instinct to procreate and to perpetuate his/her clan/species and the instinct to avoid pain/sufferings (both physical and mental), also have the effect.

That is why a mother/father can sacrifice her/his life for her/his child. That is why a person can sacrifice his/her life for his/her clan (nation) or humanity (his/her species). In some animals, it is even more obvious when the hive instinct is stronger than the individual instinct to survive – a bee or an ant will fight to its death to protect its colony.

When a person suffers a severe pain or other sufferings that he/she considers not curable, such as terminal cancer pain, the drive to avoid further sufferings can be stronger than the survival instinct. This is also the case for mental sufferings. If a person contemplates that he/she will have to endure shame, insult, humiliation, etc. that is unbearable for him/her, the drive to avoid sufferings can be stronger than the survival instinct too.

One may ask, then, why do we evolve the instinct to avoid pain/sufferings if it can lead us to premature death? The answer is that the instinct to avoid pain/sufferings in general cases help increase the survival chance of a species. Pain/sufferings, in general, are the early warnings of more serious danger or situations that may endanger life and therefore have to be avoided. The cases exampled in the previous paragraph are exceptional cases. The suicidal rate in people worldwide is only about 16/100,000 per year or about 0.016 percent per year among 7.7 billion people. It is just that evolution works in general cases, not in every particular case.

**References:**

Befrienders Worldwide. Suicide Statistics

Eric R. Pianka. Can Human Instincts Be Controlled?

Ukahoke C.The Basic Theory of the Mind. Chapter 11 - Self

Wikipedia. Self-preservation
> 3 votes

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Tags: decision-making
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title: Do bullies pick on sociopaths?

text:
# Question
Title: Do bullies pick on sociopaths?
As a percentage of their endeavours, do those with a tendency to use bullying focus more or less on sociopaths as a per capita of their targets?

# Answer
> 5 votes
> As a percentage of their endeavours, do those with a tendency to use bullying focus more or less on sociopaths as a per capita of their targets?

Thanks for this interesting question. Based on my research the short answer appears to be that there is no clear evidence either way. The longer answer is that this is probably too complicated a question to easily answer.

**Explanation**

Based on psychology today I take sociopaths to be those who have:

* A disregard for laws and social mores
* A disregard for the rights of others
* A failure to feel remorse or guilt
* A tendency to display violent behavior

It is also important to consider that sociopaths develop these traits rather than being born with them, like psychopaths are (see quote from psychology today ).

> Psychopathy is related to a physiological defect that results in the underdevelopment of the part of the brain responsible for impulse control and emotions. Sociopathy, on the other hand, is more likely the product of childhood trauma and physical/emotional abuse. Because sociopathy appears to be learned rather than innate, sociopaths are capable of empathy in certain limited circumstances but not in others, and with a few individuals but not others.

The literature on child bullying suggests that both bullies and victims tend to be more likely to have psychiatric disorders, such as sociopathy. The rates are 13% for bullies/ 8% for victims {1}. This suggests that 92% of those who are bullied are not sociopaths, but it fails to control for the fact that fewer individuals have sociopathic tendencies at that age. What is really needed is a test comparing two samples of children, on with sociopathic tendencies and one without.

An additional complication with this question is that it may be the case that children become sociopaths due to being bullied rather than being bullied because they are sociopaths {2,3}

Indeed some research {e.g., 2} suggests that anti-social personality disorder (which includes sociopathy) is the most common disorder amongst victims of bullying.

I hope this answer has been useful. Please let me know if you would like more information or need clarification on any points.

**References:**

{1} Copeland, W. E., et al. (2013). "Adult psychiatric outcomes of bullying and being bullied by peers in childhood and adolescence." JAMA psychiatry 70(4): 419-426.

{2} Sourander, A., et al. (2007). "What is the early adulthood outcome of boys who bully or are bullied in childhood? The Finnish “From a Boy to a Man” study." Pediatrics 120(2): 397-404.

{3} Arseneault, L., et al. (2010). "Bullying victimization in youths and mental health problems:‘Much ado about nothing’?" Psychological Medicine 40(05): 717-729.

# Answer
> 0 votes
I think the question asked here violates the orthodox discussion around bullying. But indeed, there's a psychological response in normal human beings towards amoral/narcissistic/sociopathic individuals. We do experience the desire to restore normalcy even with violent means. Otherwise stories about medieval knights, superheroes, and the likes would not interest us like they do.

I think normal adults suppress this desire a lot better than children. I have a narcissistic mother who regularly humiliated me in subtle ways. And as I child, I initiated a lot of physical fights with her. From the outside, I looked like a psycho, but victims of narcissistic abuse would know how totally sadistic it is even without violence.

It is possible that children who display narcissistic and sociopathic signs early on get picked up by bullies. Sometimes they are just plain creepy, which is not sufficient reason to beat someone up, but children who are sensitive to these kinds of signals may not be able to suppress the impulse to restore normalcy.

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Tags: social-psychology, abnormal-psychology
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# Question
Title: What are the reasons behind monogamy in humans?
What makes human being in anger or in mental pain once his/her partner leaves? If you think logically we can replace our partner with a new one or if alone also doesn't make any difference.

From another perspective a person having multiple partner increases the chance of having better and more offspring, so by evolution this should be a happy emotion than a sad one.

So my question is why is infidelity bad and not a good thing.

# Answer
First off, I think monogamy is a socially and culturally determined construct in man.

In the animal world both monogamy and polygamy are encountered. Monogamy increases the chance of the survival of individual offspring, as dad can help raising the offspring and can defend the family. This increases fitness.

On the on the other hand, polygamy increases the spread of the (male) genes and hence increases the chance that the male gene pool is spread.

The relative benefits of both strategies depends on many factors, including resource availability, offspring need, parental care, and mating dynamics (Klug, 2018).

<sub>**Reference**
**-** Klug, *Front Ecol Evol* (2018); 2018.00030</sub>
> 4 votes

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Tags: emotion, genetics
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# Question
Title: Using the median for non parametric (Likert) data, when it gives you a decimal place
My colleague and I are working with non-parametric Likert data.

We have been taking the median, but just realised that we are still getting values of say 2.5 or 1.5. Our justification for using the median over the mean was that values which lie between our Likert data points do not have strong meaning.

We are unsure if we should run our analysis again, always taking the minimum value or...?

Thank you.

# Answer
> 1 votes
You are using the wrong justification for using the median. The only reason you can even consider using a median or mean with Likert data is because there *is* meaning to values between Likert items. If you have "Agree" and "Strongly Agree" there is definitely the possibility of some value where someone agrees more strongly than agree but less strongly than strongly agree.

However, you lose a ton of information when you calculate the median of a Likert-like item, and it can be dangerous to do so when the shapes of the response distributions vary. Let's consider a case where you have 5 levels. These two count vectors give you the same median '3':

A = \[5 5 50 20 20\]

B = \[20 20 50 5 5\]

but the distributions are quite different and the median is not very informative about that difference.

You may consider using the "interpolated median" which treats a Likert item as indicating the interval between adjacent items, for example a "3" really means "somewhere on the interval \[2.5 3.5\]."

For the cases A and B above, the interpolated medians are:

mintA = 3.3

mintB = 2.7

# Answer
> 1 votes
Bryan's answer is just fine, I just wish to add some fundamentals on the median. A quick look on the wiki page would've told you right away that medians of integers don't necessarily have to be integers when there are an even number of observations. Consider the data set \[0 1\] - the median and mean are the same, namely 0.5. An uneven number of integers will always yield an integer median.

If you feel uncomfortable mentioning decimals of a Likert scale, consider rounding the outcomes to the nearest integer.

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Tags: data, analysis
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# Question
Title: What are the possible causes of coulrophobia?
Most sources on the internet say that coulrophobia is caused due to the unfamiliar face which often triggers fear to people (who suffer from it). What can be some other causes?

# Answer
**Coulrophobia** is a fear of clowns.

It is a phobia not (yet?) acknowledged by the WHO or the APA as a disorder. Nonetheless it seems to be an accepted phobia in hospitalized children (Meiri *et al*, 2017).

The **Guardian has a very interesting popular scientific account** on the causes of coulrophobia. The author brings up the following two convincing arguments why clowns can be scary (and others arguments as well - I encourage you to read the article itself):

* **The “uncanny valley” effect**: A phenomenon whereby things that look human, but are in fact not quite human appear as highly unsettling. Think of a dead body for example. In case of a clown their elaborate make up and weird behavior contradicts our sense of 'normal'.
* **Unpredictability** is something which causes distrust and apprehension in humans. Clowns are by their very nature unpredictable, as they always act weird and do not adhere to social standards.

<sub>**Reference**
**-** Meiri *et al*., *Eur J Pediatr* (2017); **176**(2):269-72</sub>
> 3 votes

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Tags: abnormal-psychology, fear, phobia
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title: Smoking and cognitive abilities

text:
# Question
Title: Smoking and cognitive abilities
How does smoking affect cognitive abilities?

Could it have a positive impact on alertness (like coffee)? Could it reduce our ability to concentrate? Could it lead to less oxygen in the brain, and some 'sluggishness' in thoughts?

I'm specially interested in the long term effect, present even when there's no nicotine in the body.

# Answer
Smoking is associated with reduced memory and with decline in cognitive function over the long term. Compared to people who continue smoking, people who stop smoking sooner have less decline.

From Sabia et al 2008:

> smokers compared with those who never smoked were more likely to be in the lowest quintile of cognitive performance. After adjustment for multiple covariates, this risk remained for memory (OR, 1.37; 95% CI, 1.10-1.73)

and

From Sabia et al 2012:

> Faster cognitive decline was observed among current smokers compared with never smokers in men (mean difference in 10-year decline in global cognition = −0.09 \[95% CI, −0.15 to −0.03\] and executive function = −0.11 \[95% CI, −0.17 to −0.05\]). Recent ex-smokers had greater decline in executive function (−0.08 \[95% CI, −0.14 to −0.02\]), while the decline in long-term ex-smokers was similar to that among never smokers.

In the second study, the effect was observed in men but not women.

Because these are not randomized studies (and indeed, randomizing people to smoke or not smoke over decades is not an ethical study that will ever be conducted), causality is difficult to infer, but they are strongly suggestive.

Because these are long-term studies, they say little about the acute effects of nicotine. Acutely, like other stimulants, nicotine can cause cognitive enhancement. However, long-term users become sensitive to being deprived of nicotine and require nicotine to get back to baseline. Smoking more and more and more to get a benefit is probably not a great idea, so there is no potential for nicotine to be used for long-term cognitive enhancement.

From Myers et al 2008:

> Overnight tobacco deprivation resulted in impaired functioning on all cognitive tests and increased self-reports of tobacco craving and negative mood; nicotine normalized these deficits. In the nondeprived condition, nicotine enhanced performance on the continuous performance test (CPT) and an arithmetic test in a dose-related manner, but had no effect on working memory.

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Myers, C. S., Taylor, R. C., Moolchan, E. T., & Heishman, S. J. (2008). Dose-related enhancement of mood and cognition in smokers administered nicotine nasal spray. Neuropsychopharmacology, 33(3), 588.

Sabia, S., Elbaz, A., Dugravot, A., Head, J., Shipley, M., Hagger-Johnson, G., ... & Singh-Manoux, A. (2012). Impact of smoking on cognitive decline in early old age: the Whitehall II cohort study. Archives of general psychiatry, 69(6), 627-635.

Sabia, S., Marmot, M., Dufouil, C., & Singh-Manoux, A. (2008). Smoking history and cognitive function in middle age from the Whitehall II study. Archives of internal medicine, 168(11), 1165-1173.
> 3 votes

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Tags: drugs
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# Question
Title: Is there a name for the natural human guilt complex?
Humans tend to have guilt complexes, which prevents them, for example, from taking too many samples from Costco. Is there a name for this phenomenon?

# Answer
> 1 votes
Short Answer: I'm not aware of a specific name for this, but I would describe it as *guilt-proneness*, and it is almost always associated with a high degree of conscientiousness.

Long Answer: Conscientiousness is one of the five major personality traits. People with high levels of conscientiousness feel strongly compelled to adhere to societal norms and rules, and will experience more guilt when they fear they've broken them. If extreme, in combination with other criteria, it could be classified as Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD). The DSM 5 lists eight diagnostic criteria for OCPD, one of which is "overconscientious, scrupulous, and inflexible about matters of morality, ethics, or values." However, in the absence of OCPD criteria, if I was writing a psychiatric impression of someone like you describe, I would probably say that person demonstrates and high degree of conscientiousness and is prone to guilt reactions in the face of perceived violations of his or her morals.

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Tags: terminology
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