title: Can hocd change sexual orientation?

text:
# Question
Title: Can hocd change sexual orientation?
Can sexual orientation change due to hocd (Homosexual OCD). And if it can change, is it possible to reverse the change and bring the person back to his/her original orientation.

**\[Change from heterosexual to homosexual\]**

# Answer
> 6 votes
First of all, it is important to note that the current version (5th Edition) of the DSM — Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychological Association (APA, 2013) — does not recognise homosexual obsessive-compulsive disorder (HOCD) as a mental health condition (Smith, 2021).

> Homosexual obsessive-compulsive disorder (HOCD) is a type of sexual orientation-obsessive-compulsive disorder (SO-OCD). A person with SO-OCD may have fears and anxieties relating to their sexual orientation.
>
> \[...\]
>
> A person with HOCD may have anxiety about experiencing same-sex attraction, even if they do not experience this.
>
> Because HOCD is a type of SO-OCD, some people may use the term to refer to situations wherein people who are not heterosexual experience fears about their sexual orientation.

Reading this article will explain in more detail what HOCD is reportedly all about.

## Can sexual orientation change due to HOCD?

The overarching point to put across regarding any sexual orientation is that **nothing and nobody can make you homosexual, bisexual or heterosexual**. There have been groups of therapists who tout that they can convert homosexuals into heterosexuals through conversion therapy, but:

> conversion therapy in relation to gender identity and sexual orientation (including asexuality) is unethical, potentially harmful and is not supported by evidence (BACP, 2017).

For research on this, among many others there is:

* Drescher, J., Schwartz, A., Casoy, F., McIntosh, C. A., Hurley, B., Ashley, K., ... & Tompkins, D. A. (2016). The growing regulation of conversion therapy. *Journal of Medical Regulation, 102*(2), 7-12. https://doi.org/10.30770/2572-1852-102.2.7

> Assessments of the peer-reviewed literature from multiple professional organizations, including the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatrists, have found no evidence that conversion therapy treatments result in changes in sexual orientation.

> The literature in psychotherapeutic and religious conversion therapies is reviewed, showing no evidence indicating that such treatments are effective in their intended purpose

* Adelson, S. L., & of Child, T. A. A. (2012). Practice parameter on gay, lesbian, or bisexual sexual orientation, gender nonconformity, and gender discordance in children and adolescents. *Journal of the American academy of child & adolescent psychiatry, 51*(9), 957-974. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaac.2012.07.004

> Principle 6
>
> Clinicians should be aware that there is no evidence that sexual orientation can be altered through therapy, and that attempts to do so may be harmful.

This led to the Coalition Against Conversion Therapy (CACT), a coalition of leading psychological, psychotherapeutic, and counselling organisations committed to ending conversion therapy, who prepared a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on Conversion Therapy in the UK (UKCP, 2017), and signed by many UK professional governing bodies, including (see the corresponding links) the National Counselling Society (NCS), British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), National Health Service (NHS), The British Psychological Society (BPS), and the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP).

## References

APA. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM-5®). *American Psychiatric Pub*. https://www.psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/practice/dsm

BACP. (2017). *Memorandum of understanding on conversion therapy in the UK* https://www.bacp.co.uk/events-and-resources/ethics-and-standards/mou/

Smith, A. (2021). What is homosexual obsessive-compulsive disorder (HOCD)? *Medical News Today* https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/hocd

UKCP (2017) *Conversion Therapy* https://www.psychotherapy.org.uk/policy-and-research/public-policy/conversion-therapy/

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Tags: sexuality
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# Question
Title: How does the neuron recover from hyperpolarizationn?
Assume we're at the state where the potassium gates have closed. Inside the membrane should still be more negative relative to its resting potential. This source claims that the sodium-potassium pump brings the membrane potential back up to the resting potential. However, as far as I understand, sodium-potassium pump creates a **net negative** charge inside the cell by pumping out three Na+ molecules and bringing in two K+ molecules. How would the pump make the membrane potential more positive? Please let me know if I am misunderstanding something.

# Answer
> 1 votes
The sodium potassium pump keeps ion concentrations consistently imbalanced with sodium higher outside and potassium higher inside the cell. The direct impacts it has on voltage are negligible, I'd recommend just ignoring them. If your source specifically says the pump returns the cell to rest after hyperpolarization, this is **wrong**. A cell could fire several action potentials and return to rest without any pump required, because ion concentrations hardly change during the whole process. You only need the pump in the long term to maintain ion concentrations.

What is important for determining membrane potential is conductances to various ions and the weighted sum of their reversal potentials. Individual reversal potentials can be determined by the Nernst equation; the weighted sum can be determined by the Goldman equation. All the questions you have about what voltage a cell is moving towards are answered by these related equations.

The reason a cell can become hyperpolarized after action potentials is because the weighted sum of ion reversal potentials at rest is less negative than that of potassium alone. If you have extra potassium channels open (voltage gated potassium channels), membrane potential will head closer to potassium reversal.

Nothing special has to happen to return to rest, it's just that at rest the combined conductances of all ions through leak channels and other channels give an expected membrane potential that is not as negative as potassium alone. You can think of this as mostly due to modest resting conductances of sodium and chloride.

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Tags: neuroscience
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# Question
Title: Cannot find a journal paper on a study on caffeine, even though it is registered at clinicaltrials.gov
Can somebody help me find the following study: *Effects of Low Doses of Caffeine on Mood, Physiology and Mental Function*, listed under trial identifier *NCT00487227* on ClinicalTrials.gov.

It's a very interesting study regarding the effect of very low doses of caffeine on cognitive variables. The study is listed as completed but I'm unable to find the study on google, google scholar or pubmed

# Answer
> 4 votes
See Caffeine at levels found in decaffeinated beverages is behaviourally active *Appetite* Volume 50, Issues 2–3, March–May 2008, Page 559.

It's just a conference abstract though.

# Answer
> 6 votes
**Short answer**
Haskall *et al*., The effects of L-theanine, caffeine and their combination on cognition and mood, *Biol Psych* (2008); **77**: 113–22.

**Background**
Here's some of the detective work I've done:

The principal investigator of this study is listed on your link on ClinicalTrials.gov as Andrew Scholey of Northumbria University.

Looking on Google Scholar, and searching with the key terms "Andrew + Scholey + Caffeine" and looking for publications *after* the study's '*actual completion date*', as listed on ClinicalTrials.gov, I found an article by Scholey & coworkers, namely: Haskall *et al*., *Biol Psych* (2008); **77**: 113–22.

The study doesn't mention 'ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT00487227' explicitly, but given the study's senior author (Scholey), the publication date (2008) being a few years after the clinical study's completion date (2005), and the topic of the paper (cognitive effects of caffeine) that closely resembles the clinical trial's topic, I bet this is the article you're after.

Otherwise, I should simply contact Scholey - most researchers appreciate an email enquiry about their work. More often than not they're eager to spread their work across the scientific community.

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Tags: reference-request, clinical-psychology, psychopharmacology
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title: Consciousness without language

text:
# Question
Title: Consciousness without language
It seems that consciousness can only be investigated through self-report, i.e. language/communication of some kind. Is it believed that consciousness could nonetheless exist without language?

Yes, it is assumed that non-human animals have varying degrees of consciousness - but this seems somewhat unverifiable without our capacity to ask them.

Conversely, has there ever been a human being to grow up without language for years and then learn a language sufficiently well to be questioned regarding their subjective experience prior to learning the language?

# Answer
> 2 votes
Yes, as Ray Jackendoff reports in chapter 16 of *A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning*, where he answers precisely this question:

> A more promising source of evidence comes from congenitally deaf individuals who have had no exposure to a signed language. If they learn a signed language as adults, we can ask them what their thinking was like before. In a BBC documentary on the relatively new signed language of Nicaragua, one such person says (in the English transla-tion), “I didn’t even know what it meant to think. Thinking meant nothing to me.” Of course he must have been able to think before he learned to speak—after all, he wasn’t a robot or a zombie, he was func-tioning in society at least to some degree. But—as predicted by the Unconscious Meaning Hypothesis—he wasn’t aware of it.

> Another report presents the experience of a deaf individual who had never put together an English sentence until he was 9 or 10 years old, and was not exposed to sign language until college. He has memories of wondering how the world worked, but having no way to ask the questions. He recalls having a sense that other people could communicate with each other, but that he wasn’t able to. He describes saving up his questions until he had a way of asking them. For example, he reports having wondered at 5 or 6 years old how people communicated on the telephone. One day he wanted his mother to stop talking on the phone. He knew from observation that a hose could be crimped to stop the flow of water, so he applied this reason-ing to the telephone cord and tried to stop the sound by crimping the cord (to no avail, of course). According to this report, then, this deaf boy had questions in his mind without having a language to think in. What’s more, his story about the telephone shows that he was able to use analogical reasoning without talking his way through the logic in his head. The Unconscious Meaning Hypothesis leads us to ask: In what form did he experience these questions and this reasoning? Does this represent some form of “imageless thought”? From his description when asked about it, it sounds as though his experience was in terms of some kind of visual or kinesthetic imagery—the feel one has for “how things work”— accom-panied by a feeling of connection or of questioning a connection between observed actions.

# Answer
> 2 votes
Language is a means of expression and communication. It serves as a medium of expression. Consciousness is independent of language. One (human or any animal) can be conscious however to report and verify, as you said, we need a language or any medium of communication.

Consciousness could safely considered an axiom in psychology.

For the second question, you have bumped on to one of the canonical pairs. How do we explain nothing? Ideally we cannot. The same is with consciousness. It is a fundamental thing. A formal verification might require a revisit to the fundamentals of philosophy and psychology.

Reference: Thought without language: Thought without awareness? - L.Weiskrantz

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Tags: consciousness, language
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# Question
Title: Counterfactual thinking and the origin of language
I want to apologize in advance for my dearth of knowledge concerning cognitive science research and history, I'm an AI student.

I've been reading up on cognitive science/linguistics literature mostly to get a better grasp on the physical symbol system hypothesis/language of thought vs connectionism debate.

I read this very interesting review of Berwick and Chomsky's book "Why Only Us" by Ian Tattersall, in which he exposes the authors' idea that language suddenly appeared as a result of a minor mutation in our ancestors' brain 80,000 years ago. However, because of the lack of linguistic archeological artefacts, it is impossible to prove. He then goes on:

> If that is true, perhaps the best proxies we can seek for language in the human archaeological record are objects or activities that reflect the working of symbolic human minds: minds capable of envisioning that the world could be otherwise than it is at this moment.

And my question is then: why does counterfactual thinking require a symbolic mind? It seems perfectly plausible to imagine a species who can't talk but can still imagine "other world" scenarios using his visual system. However, a counter-argument is that animals have a highly developed visual system, yet they can't think counterfactually. (Hariri is famous for saying "You can never convince a chimpanzee to give you a banana by promising him that after he dies, he will get limitless bananas in chimpanzee Heaven.")

This all seems related to the LoT vs Connectionism debate: did we first grow a mind strong enough to do counterfactual thinking, which was also able to process language, or is language and symbolic thought really the precursor to higher level thinking like counterfactual thinking?

# Answer
This is controversial, to say the least, and possibly false according to one interpretation on such experiments with monkeys. But note that there is a subtlety here: the way counterfactuals are usually tested with monkeys involves them having seen what a reward could have been, but had not received.

> Recent studies on reinforcement learning in primates indicate that humans are not alone in our ability to think about hypothetical outcomes. For example, Lee and colleagues (Abe & Lee 2011, Lee et al. 2005) presented rhesus monkeys with a computer-based version of the game rock- paper-scissors. When they examined the strategies that the monkeys used over time, they found that monkeys did not simply adjust their choices based on what they received on the previous trial. Surprisingly, monkeys also adjusted their strategy to account for rewards they would have received had they chosen a different option. Using a similar computer-based setup, Hayden and colleagues (2009) presented rhesus monkeys with a risky decision-making task with eight possible choices. Whereas seven of the options consistently provided small juice rewards, the final option was variable: Sometimes it provided a much larger reward, and sometimes it provided a much smaller reward. Critically, monkeys were given feedback about what the risky option would have provided on every trial. In this way, monkeys could see how much juice they would have gotten from the risky option, regardless of whether they had chosen it. As in the rock-paper-scissors task, modeling of the monkeys’ behaviors showed that the monkeys adjusted their future strategies on the basis of what they would have received. In cases where the risky option would have provided the high-value outcome on one trial, monkeys were especially likely to seek this option out in future trials. In this way, **monkeys—like humans—change their future choices according to counterfactual situations that could have (but did not) happen**.

(There's subsequent para that discusses that monkeys, like us, seem to be driven by regret-like emotional responses in such matters.)

More recent experiments indicate that monkeys intentionally explore the "counterfactual space", i.e. try to find out what rewards they might have missed, even if they aren't just shown these potential rewards without them incurring an actual cost (in terms of missing other rewards, already known to them). Rather unsurprisingly, monkeys are willing to pay, in terms of missing certain rewards for finding out "what else is there", i.e. they ("deliberately") pay for information.

I think Chomsky isn't really talking about this though; actually he's not even using "counterfactual" in the para you cited but "minds capable of envisioning that the world could be otherwise than it is at this moment". Basically: do the monkeys merely think of the world in a seen-potential-reward and seeking-information-about-unknown-rewards fashion, or do they "truly imagine" there could be rewards they didn't ever see? That's probably (very) difficult to test. Basically, his thesis/question isn't really about counterfactual thinking, but whether monkeys "have imagination" in some kind of "visual language" perhaps...
> 1 votes

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Tags: evolution, linguistics, artificial-intelligence
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# Question
Title: How are IQ test scores affected by psychological stress or trauma?
Does mental stress or trauma have a significant impact on IQ test performance relative to baseline, and if so, how much?

For example, if a person is affected by abuse, bullying, neglect, or some other stressor or trauma, then how much of an effect would that have on their test score?

# Answer
Short answer: The effect of stress and trauma on IQ varies significantly according to type and severity, but is overall fairly low relative to normal variation in scores.

IQ test development is heavily concerned with reliability (consistent scores) so while some variation is inevitable, IQ tests are designed to minimize the impact of stress:

> ... test-takers may have varying scores when taking the same test on differing occasions, and may have varying scores when taking different IQ tests at the same age. ... For modern tests, the confidence interval can be approximately 10 points ...

Additionally, particularly low or high IQ scores are less reliable than median scores. Nonetheless:

> Outside influences such as low motivation or high anxiety can occasionally lower a person's IQ test score.

So, up to approximately 10 IQ points difference in scores can be accounted for by measurement error and performance variability, but stressors can potentially result in larger differences.

Despite the broad scope of the question, I was not able to find any recent dedicated literature reviews on the effects of any particular type of stress or trauma on IQ, so conclusions are based on a sample of recent available studies.

Marcus Jenkins et al (2013) looked at the effects of family stress on child IQ:

> ... we identified four subconstructs that capture family stress: Marital conflict, parenting stress, depressive symptoms and maternal history of psychiatric disorders. ... None of the family stress components mediated the effect of the SES components on child IQ.

Delaney-Black et al (2002), Ratner et al (2006), Koenen et al (2003), Ybarra, Wilkens, & Lieberman (2007), and Ghazi et al (2012) looked at the effects of violence and trauma on child IQ:

> ... a child experiencing both violence exposure and trauma-related distress at or above the 90th percentile would be expected to have a 7.5-point (SD, 0.5) decrement in IQ ...

Butler et al (2018) and Sharkey (2010) found similar effects on adolescent IQ. However, Saigh et al (2006) and DePrince, Weinzierl, & Combs (2009) also looked at the impact of violence and trauma on child IQ, but found no effect.

Viezel, Freer, & Castillo (2015) looked at the effect of abuse and neglect, and found an approximately 5-point decrement in child IQ, while Doerfler, Toscano, & Connor (2008) looked at the effect of abuse on adolescent IQ:

> For Performance IQ or Full Scale IQ scores, there were no significant main effects for gender or abuse experience.

Kira et al (2012), Kira et al (2012), and Kira et al (2014) looked at the effect of a variety of different stressors and traumas - including abuse, bullying, abandonment, and violence - on adolescent IQ in 2 vulnerable sub-groups:

> Our findings support the hypothesis that different trauma types have different influences, some positive and some negative. ... In conclusion, trauma type differentially impacts IQ.

However, the effect of stress on overall IQ was small (r\<0.15).

Note that many studies found significant effects of stress and trauma on IQ sub-tests and sub-components, though overall IQ was often not significantly affected. Note also that ethical conduct makes stress and trauma difficult to manipulate experimentally, so these studies are largely retrospective, or at best prospective, but not randomized controlled studies. Thus, study quality is an issue, making conclusions tentative - in particular, the direction of causality is not always entirely clear.
> 3 votes

# Answer
Stress will certainly affect your test performance and cognition, see Lupien 2007.

It might be a bit hard to measure this in an experiment, as the same individuals have to take the test with and without stress. But then you have to control for some learned effect, second time the test might be easier.
> 0 votes

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Tags: measurement, intelligence, iq, stress, trauma
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title: How Sexual fluidity works?

text:
# Question
Title: How Sexual fluidity works?
Can a heterosexual male that doesn't have any attraction towards male become gay without any attraction towards females.

Or will he become bisexual because he was heterosexual before.

# Answer
> 1 votes
Sexuality is thought to be mostly fixed (and certainly does not respond to active interventions to change it), but sometimes self-descriptions shift. It's unclear to what extent these shifts are changes in sexuality itself versus changes in how people *identify*. More broadly speaking, people aren't always good at describing their own wants/desires/feelings, and social and cultural factors can have a strong influence. Individuals may have experiences that make them rethink how they see themselves, or they may be more or less comfortable expressing a view that is outside perceived norms at different times.

Savin-Williams et al 2012 studied a group of young adults longitudinally and compared self-reported sexual orientation during two study waves, one when participants were 18-24 and later when they were 24-34.

Out of 5204 men who reported being "100% heterosexual" in the first wave, the vast majority, 5064, said the same in the second wave. 105 said "mostly heterosexual", 11 said "bisexual", 24 said "homosexual". Other categories were somewhat more fluid, as was sexuality among women, and you can see the whole study linked below.

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Savin-Williams, R. C., Joyner, K., & Rieger, G. (2012). Prevalence and stability of self-reported sexual orientation identity during young adulthood. Archives of sexual behavior, 41(1), 103-110.

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Tags: sexuality
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# Question
Title: What is "required reading" in training that describe mechanisms behind learning?
I've previously studied spiking neural networks in the context of machine learning applications and I'm interested in gaining a better understanding of the biology of the brain. My goal is to investigate different models for learning.

I am looking for a book within training material that describes the low level bio-chemistry of neurons and how the learning process works. I'm not sure if that is a well understood topic yet; I would also be interested in papers discussing the topic.

There are a few questions which I'm interested in and hope to answer by reading said material:

* Does the brain use local or global information for learning?
* What brain functions are important to learning?
* What are the advantages of having a neural gap?
* Can neural transmitters produced by a synaptic cleft affect nearby neurons?
* How does myelination affect how babies learn?

# Answer
The questions you list are **incredibly broad and diverse**. You will find basic textbooks that may touch on aspects of all of these, but otherwise will not find answers to them all in one book. Some may not be answerable at all at the textbook level; others like "How does myelination affect how babies learn?" I feel are not really well-posed questions but some background will help you understand why.

I'd recommend starting with a broad undergraduate-level neuroscience textbook. These will assume you have some prior knowledge of the basics of molecular and cell biology, as well as physics (electricity and magnetism in particular; at least enough to be comfortable with basic circuits: voltage and current, resistors and capacitors, etc).

The two I would recommend (pick just one or the other) are:

Neuroscience, by Purves et al

and

Principles of Neural Science, by Kandel et al
> 2 votes

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Tags: neuroscience, learning, neurophysiology
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# Question
Title: Is it possible to get good hallucination while suffering from schizophrenia?
> Schizophrenia : A disorder that affects a person's ability to think, feel and behave clearly. The exact cause of schizophrenia isn't known, but a combination of genetics, environment and altered brain chemistry and structure may play a role.

So basically you get hallucination in Schizophrenia. I watched a **Video** about Schizophrenia and it say something like this .

*People who suffer from Schizophrenia have hallucination like* :

* Fishes are swimming all around them.
* Books are melting.
* Strange voices are ordering them to to something.

*But can anyone have hallucination like* :

* a woman is loving them(sexually and romantically) .
* They have many good friends
* The voice in the head are telling them answers in an exam.

**So basically can anyone get hallucination that they will enjoy**.

# Answer
The short answer appears to be yes, to a certain degree, though there seems to be a need for more research in this area of viewing hallucinations as a boon, rather than a curse.

The positive symptoms of schizophrenia, in this case, hallucinations, often vary in how they appear to the subject. Some argue that one of the keys to how one might react to the manifestation of hallucinations has to do with their culture.

Larøi et al (2014), shows that changing perspective on the hallucinations in a more positive direction might help cope or manage the symptoms, they emphasize that cultural background needs to be considered, as there may not be a need for an intervention or help if the individual's culture does not view the hallucinations as bizarre or abnormal.

A great example would be the way people claim to be able to see or talk with a deity that has proliferated throughout the culture they inhabit. It becomes something that might be giving them those answers to an exam or that the hallucination is in love with them. It should also be noted that not everybody who has hallucinations is going to show up in a clinical setting, so we still have do not have much data on how these symptoms manifest in different cultures. Something which Larøi et al mention in their article.

Reference:

Larøi, F., Luhrmann, T. M., Bell, V., Christian Jr, W. A., Deshpande, S., Fernyhough, C., ... & Woods, A. (2014). Culture and hallucinations: overview and future directions. *Schizophrenia bulletin, 40*(Suppl\_4), S213-S220. https://doi.org/10.1093/schbul/sbu012
> 3 votes

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Tags: neuroscience, schizophrenia, hallucinations
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# Question
Title: What are some reasons that make rule-based reasoning about morality more intuitive than utilitarian reasoning?
Anecdotally, people are often more into rule-based reasoning. For instance, "honesty is always the right policy" is widely accepted throughout many cultures. It is less often for cultures to naturally adopt a more consequentialist view of morality.

In the English language, saying someone is "principled" is almost synonymous with saying that person is "moral". The same thing is true in Chinese: (saying someone is 有原则的 is the same as saying that person is 好的，正直的，高尚的.)

What are some psychological and cognitive reasons that make rule-based reasoning of morality more intuitive?

# Answer
> 1 votes
I don't know if this really answers your question, but at a high level, rule-based reasoning about anything is more intuitive. By this I mean, rules are heuristics-- and having heuristics makes for more efficient reaction formation, decision-making, action, etc. The time and energy to process a stimulus, including a morally relevant scenario, is reduced when applying a heuristic, like a rule.

Morality is not my area of expertise, But I will add that there's possibly also a component here of some discomfort associated with making moral evaluations. Moral judgements serve as functional guides of behavioral consequences and outcomes (having real impact in people's lives), and typically involve some degree of uncertainty. This may cause discomfort, whereas rule-based reasoning allows for avoidance of careful thought and therefore avoidance of that discomfort ..? Just a thought, no real evidence to back that

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Tags: moral-psychology
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# Question
Title: Why aren't any advancements being made in physically diagnosing Bipolar and other psychiatric disorders?
I was involved in a discussion where somebody had asked if others had thoughts of doing risky things during their manic episodes. Two people commented, including myself. I worried that only relying on a specific set of guidelines established by the diagnostic and Statistical Manual on Mental Disorders fifth edition could lead to disastrous consequences.

Let's say somebody came into a psychiatrist's office. The person has previously read the DSMV and understands the criteria. That person played their cards right to convince the psychiatrist to diagnose them with Bipolar Disorder, when in truth that person might not likely have it at all. Instead, their true motive would have been to get free benzos so they could space out and get high.

On the other end of the spectrum, some people have been misdiagnosed, leading to unwanted and unnecessary medications.

For both of these situations, why can't blood tests and other physical and objective means be used to insure that neither party is in doubt? You can't lie on a blood test or magneto encephalogram, so why not this?

# Answer
> 12 votes
**Short Answer**

Science is hard, brains are complicated, and the premises of your question that there is not work being done or advancements in this area is false.

**Longer Answer**

There is no known specific cause of bipolar disorder (as for many other psychological disorders). There is no simple statement like "bipolar disorder happens when you are low on XYZ so let's test for XYZ." Bipolar disorder and many others are in fact *defined* by the DSM based on *symptoms* \- diagnosing them in another way is not the gold standard.

That said, you seem to be implying especially in your comment "why isn't one being developed" that this isn't an active area of research. It is - a helpful search term for you will be 'biomarker'; Google Scholar returns 4,480 results since 2017 for ("bipolar disorder" "biomarker").

However, all of the suggested biomarkers are some combination of A) Not specific (i.e., are positive for other conditions), B) Not sensitive (i.e., are negative for people that do have bipolar disorder), C) Expensive or invasive (i.e., not really worth doing if they have issues with A and B), or highly dependent on other individual factors.

# Answer
> 3 votes
Because it's not as easy at it may seem. There is no direct biological distinguishment of any kind in such a case. It's like some prefer red, some prefer blue, some like both equally.

In order to link this condition to any bio-chemical causes, very long term studies would be needed and the persons with Bipolar Disorder will likely not volunteer for such studies.

It is not excluded that a very long term study may find a bio-chemical distinguishment unique to these individuals but that did not happened yet.

Related references (There are probably hundreds of references. Here's a few):

# Answer
> 2 votes
I could be wrong, since I'm not a doctor and all, but it's my understanding based on about ten years of studying issues like bipolar disorder online that to be diagnosed with bipolar disorder, as well as other disorders, like OCD, people merely need to have a set of symptoms, which disrupt their lives sufficiently, which hopefully respond to certain kinds of treatment (and of course, they probably need to be diagnosed in order for them to officially have it). This, as opposed to a *specific* physiological and/or genetic condition that causes or might cause the symptoms. It's not like strep throat where you can test for bacteria for a *definitive* diagnosis. There could be infinite causes of bipolar disorder as I understand it.

Thus, any tests that could diagnose it might miss a plethora of cases, and many of the people diagnosed by those tests might manage their condition perfectly already (which means they don't have bipolar disorder).

It's my understanding that the aim of such tests would be to assist doctors in making a good diagnosis rather than to replace the doctor's decision.

Nevertheless, there could be other conditions with symptoms similar to bipolar disorder, which do have a definitive underlying cause: e.g. vitamin B12 deficiency. I guess it's probably up to the doctor to decide if the individual also has bipolar disorder.

Anyway, I'm not saying bipolar disorder is all in one's head. At least some of the symptoms are physiological (such as how patients tend to get more manic if they take anti-depressants). I'm sure a lot of doctors use that criteria to help them diagnose the condition already. While I don't know another condition that would match that issue, it's possible there is one. However, just because symptoms are physiological doesn't mean they always have the same cause, which means they could have different methods of diagnosis.

Now, all that being said, while I still think a definitive test is possible, a new way of testing would perhaps be needed. A blood test isn't going to tell you behaviors or how well a person is managing their symptoms, or if the person is using good coping mechanisms that might cause them to not need a diagnosis. A blood test may tell you things that predispose people to behaviors and symptoms, however.

I wrote this answer before I read Bryan Crause's (I just read it). So, sorry that I repeated some of it.

# Answer
> 1 votes
From https://neurosciencenews.com/depression-bipolar-blood-test-18197/:

> A new blood test can distinguish the severity of a person’s depression and their risk for developing severe depression at a later point. The test can also determine if a person is at risk for developing bipolar disorder. Researchers say the blood test can also assist in tailoring individual options for therapeutic interventions.

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Tags: neuroscience, psychiatry, bipolar-disorder, drugs
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# Question
Title: Is being a morning person vs a night person actually a real thing or just a preference?
Are there real physical differences between a morning person vs a night person that can be measured and used to explain the difference?

Or is it just an adapted preference randomly varying from person to person?

# Answer
(see also this Q&A over at Biology.SE: https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/93965/why-do-morning-people-have-shorter-biological-clocks/93966)

It's a real thing, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's set in stone or that preferences can't be changed/learned.

At least some portion of these preferences seem to be genetic and related to regulation of circadian rhythms. In brief: animals, including humans, have a system of molecular "clocks" that keep track of roughly the length of a day. These clocks most often run naturally slightly longer than 24 hours: if you keep someone (or, preferably, a lab animal) in constant darkness, they will still keep a daily sleep/wake cycle, but it will drift over time, corresponding to a \>24 hour day.

To actually follow the real cycle of day and night, *light* is used to resynchronize the clock every day.

If someone's "natural" clock (without light synchronization) runs a bit shorter (faster) than average, you'd expect that person would tend to feel like waking up a bit earlier as well as feeling tired a bit earlier in the evening - a morning person. If someone's natural clock runs a bit slower than an actual day, then morning will come a bit sooner than they prefer, and in the evening they won't quite feel tired yet.

That said, like most traits of this nature, the biological underpinnings of these tendencies only explain part of it, and you would not expect to find people sorted neatly into "morning" and "night" but rather to follow something like a Gaussian distribution, with most people in the middle.

Here's a recent genome-wide association study and a review of some others on "chronotype" (the morning/night preference you ask about):

Jones, S. E., Lane, J. M., Wood, A. R., van Hees, V. T., Tyrrell, J., Beaumont, R. N., ... & Weedon, M. N. (2019). Genome-wide association analyses of chronotype in 697,828 individuals provides insights into circadian rhythms. Nature communications, 10(1), 1-11.

Kalmbach, D. A., Schneider, L. D., Cheung, J., Bertrand, S. J., Kariharan, T., Pack, A. I., & Gehrman, P. R. (2017). Genetic basis of chronotype in humans: insights from three landmark GWAS. Sleep, 40(2).
> 2 votes

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Tags: sleep
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# Question
Title: What is the opposite of an insult for the purposes of triggering lasting positive affect?
Over the centuries, western cultures have developed dozens of swear words, insults and curse words that are intended to trigger acute negative affect in the recipient. If one particular word does not work, the insulter would typically cycle through the words until he/she finds the one that "strikes a chord" and causes the intended level of emotional distress.

What interests me is that the right insult quickly triggers emotional pain. Unless a person knows how to mitigate the effect, the negative emotion is likely to stay with the person for minutes to hours.

This makes me ask - **What are there opposite of insults for the purposes of triggering positive emotion that lingers on afterwards?**

Is there some kind of word or action that instantly triggers positive emotions of equal magnitude? Terms like praise come to mind, but I'm not sure praise is as powerful as insults.

# Answer
> 4 votes
The words we use have no inherent capacity to evoke negative or positive affect. Instead, how we appraise, reappraise, attend to, and reflect on those words determines our affective response (e.g., Gross, 1998; Siemer, Mauss, & Gross, 2007).

For example, you could tell one person "You are stupid" and he/she might become extremely upset. You could tell another person the same thing, and he/she would have no affective response. Similarly, telling someone "You are nice" could make someone very happy or not change his/her mood at all.

**So how can we predict who will respond most intensely?** Philippe Verduyn and colleagues (2009; 2011) have looked at predictors of greater emotion response duration, which include:

* The salience of the emotion-eliciting event
* How you conceptualize your positive/negative affect (joy lasts longer than anger, which lasts longer than fear)
* Intensity of the emotion at onset
* Physical reappearances of the emotion-eliciting stimulus
* Stimulus-related cognitions with the same valence as the emotion
* Social sharing (consistent with Bernard Rimé's work)

How one chooses to regulate their emotions in response to an insult or compliment would also influence emotion reactivity and duration, including tendency to distract oneself from the stimulus (Sheppes et al., 2014) or skill in reappraising the situation (e.g., McRae et al., 2012).

We would also expect depressive rumination (see Susan Nolen-Hoeksema's work) and positive rumination or savoring (e.g., Feldman, Joormann, & Johnson, 2008; Quoidbach, Berry, Hansenne, & Mikolajczak, 2010) to predict intensity of responses to insults and compliments, respectively.

## Conclusion

So the point is that **there are no special words or phrases that will reliably evoke some level of positive affect**. Instead, the emotional intensity evoked by a stimulus depends on the salience of the stimulus, proximity to the stimulus, and individual differences in emotional responding (i.e., reactivity and regulation; see Gross & Barrett, 2011). If you take these into account, you can devise more powerful insults and compliments.

# Answer
> 1 votes
The term used for something nice one says to somebody, often for positive psychological effect, is called a Compliment.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/compliment

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/compliment

One can also use Flattery (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/flattery) or Praise (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/praise) or Commendation (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/commendation)

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, emotion, language, positive-psychology
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# Question
Title: Is there a clinical definition for the psychological disorder/personality disorder for people who like to get under people’s skin?
I have noticed in my 50+ years of life that there are people who take joy (sometimes great joy) out of “getting under” another person’s skin. Is there a clinical definition for this behavior? Perhaps it is a personality disorder.

(There is a non-clinical way to describe such a person but civility restrains me).

I have noticed that people who exhibit this behavior seem to be looking for a reaction. And by seeing a reaction to what they say, they see their control over another person. It may also be the only way the person knows how to impress others (possibly due to low self-esteem).

I have searched the internet and all I have found so far is information on how to deal with such a person.

# Answer
Taking joy in irritating others is unlikely to be classifiable as a personality disorder, however, the Dark Triad describes individuals with disagreeable habits. In combination with other extremely adverse behaviours, it is perhaps classifiable as Conduct disorder or Narcissistic personality disorder.
> 4 votes

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Tags: personality, terminology
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# Question
Title: Do children inherit intelligence from their mothers and not their fathers?
This article, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/children-intelligence-iq-mother-inherit-inheritance-genetics-genes-a7345596.html?cmpid=facebook-post, suggests that children inherit intelligence from mothers, and that fathers have basically no role in that (except emotional and intuitional "intelligence" as they call it).

Since often journalists can misinterpret scientific studies, I am interested, if there are researchers in this field on this site, who can say **to what extent is the statement in this article**:

"Children inherit intelligence only from their mothers and not their fathers" - **true**?

# Answer
The psychology-spot article mostly links to researches done on mice. Only three links are about human genetics. One is philosophical in nature, other two deal with mental retardation. This study says that:

> "X chromosome contains a significantly higher number of genes that, when mutated, cause mental impairment".

We know that boys get their X chromosome from their mothers. Therefore, they inherit mental retardation from their mothers. But look at the terminology used in the research paper. They have not found some IQ value stored somewhere in the X chromosome. Therefore, we cannot say that mutations in the X chromosome is responsible for high intelligence as well (the study proposes such a link, but has no data to support it). There is a mystery here: if mothers carry key to mental retardation in sons, it must be a hidden trait in women because they do not exhibit that deviation as much as men.

This study takes mother's IQ into account, but it does not make any attempt to establish a direct link between the IQ of mother and son.

Conclusion: We can assume that boys inherit mental retardation from mothers (because boys get mother's X chromosome). We can not assume anything else yet, not from this study.

The following is pure speculation: Men have higher deviation in their intelligence Bell curve on both sides. If one side of it is linked to their mothers, the other side might as well be, but it probably has nothing to do with the intelligence of the mother. In my personal opinion, that article is just wishful feminist thinking. If such link was present, it would have been highlighted long ago.
> 5 votes

# Answer
*I am adding another answer because the previous one has already been upvoted by others. I am retreating from my previous conclusion, and I think it would be unfair to carry forward the upvotes to my current opinion.*

I looked into genetics after having this conversation between me and no comprende:

> ...........We know that boys get their X chromosome from their mothers........... we cannot say that mutations in the X chromosome is responsible for high intelligence ........... if mothers carry key to mental retardation in sons, it must be a hidden trait........

Response:

> ......... females get 2 copies, so recessive harmful mutations show up far less in females.............if one copy makes a good version and the other makes a bad version, you are still functional – no comprende

The old Dominant and recessive gene theory to explain why females suffer less genetic anomalies has been challenged. The reason is X inactivation. X inactivation prevents two copies of same allele being active on an offspring and it occurs at a very early stage. The choice of which one to disable is random, but it has been observed that even distribution of inactivation in XX heterozygote is better for health. Skewed inactivation has been associated with genetic diseases like breast cancer and mental retardation.

Unfortunately, we also found this. Basically, X-skewed mothers have only 25% chance of passing on their active (those responsible for retardation) alleles to their sons.

There are two conclusive studies that resolve the puzzle by showing that X chromosome is indeed key to our general intelligence, but it is still a male trait because X chromosome is enriched for male-specific but not female-specific genes. Females do not get to enjoy most of its benefits despite being the bigger carriers of it.

In conclusion I have to agree with Jennifer's theory, but she has not made it clear what "inheriting intelligence from mother" actually means. We should not try to seek validation of our social idealism in genetics because genetics records our past. It does present some hard limits, but not this time. I did not find any ill-effect of choosing an intellectually gifted female as mating partner.

From a scientist's standpoint, it will be interesting to see (sadly we will not live to see it) how our genes cope if our mating choices start changing. There are some inefficiencies in our genes that may pose some problems, but who knows?
> 1 votes

# Answer
Just heard a Facebook meme about this and it seems to be making another round of online. The population studies seems quite old following a cohort from 1994 to 2004. Rather than a genetic study, it seems to be more a correlational study

https://www.kidspot.com.au/parenting/child/child-development/childs-intelligence-comes-from-their-mums-science-says/news-story/273b4cffce35fb935e576c0afba0cf5e
> 0 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, experimental-psychology, intelligence, genetics
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title: What are ERP components such as N400?

text:
# Question
Title: What are ERP components such as N400?
A lot of research uses ERP, which is time-locked EEG. I am reading about semantic and syntactic anomalies. So when a semantic anomaly occurs there is supposed to be a negative peak in ERP at 400ms. I have some questions how this this component was established and how the data is collected?

Is there an assumption that these peaks happen in all individuals always at the same time? Is it only an assumption or is there evidence of invariability? Let's say the peak happens at 420 ms would you than use the amplitude from 400 ms or from 420?

Is the data collected from the whole brain and averaged out?

# Answer
> 4 votes
The semantic N400 and syntactic P600 are some of the most well established ERP components in the literature. They were discovered decades ago and the results have been replicated hundreds of times in other papers. There is just no question that they are present and very robust. That's not saying they are there 100% of the time in 100% of people. All we know is that it's a very easy response to get out and by now it would be surprising / worthy of investigation if people didn't show them in the standard paradigm.

There is a paper from a few years ago that looks at the 30 years of N400 research and all the papers that found the effects. It's probably a bit out of date now but it does a great summary of the research up until that point.

I think Hillyard & Kutas (1983) is the original paper.

ERP components are not always so tightly linked in time. You can module them based on task context and shift them by all sorts of ways so it's never that the peak is exactly at 400 ms post-stimulus. It can start WAY before then and end WAY after then. Broadly, we use N400 to talk about a large response that peaks "in that time window" (so, from 300-500ms). I wouldn't get too fixated on the specific milliseconds. Therefore you don't "use" the amplitude for anything (not sure I understood that part of your question).

Typically you see N400 over central-parietal electrodes. There is a bit of confusion over exactly what the cortical sources are but MEG and fMRI do support the idea it's a strong dipole with the positive component slightly in the LH and therefore EEG electrodes over central and parietal sites pick up the strongest signal. This also gets at what you use as your reference electrode because EEG potentials are differential and the patterns you see on the head are very dependent on reference / ground settings.

Typically you would group electrodes over general position and look at central-parietal ones or you could plot individual responses (both ways would still show the N400). As with anything in science, it's up to you what you show.

# Answer
> 1 votes
Just for reference, I'm an undergrad but I'm doing an N400 study currently.

As for your latter questions, since I think the former have been answered really nicely(it is kinda a harder concept, data visualization has helped me a lot)

The process I used summarized is:

1. epoch data (i.e. take out time points you aren't interested in). I set my time window from -100 to 1200ms from the point they perceived the stimuli.
2. artifact detection, where you find trials where someone blinked or an electrode contact was off (aka impedance)
3. compile this into a .csv file, data is saved per electrode cite. I only wrote 4 electrodes to .csv because it is a lot of data and we are more interested in the front left hemisphere in observing the N400 because that's where the largest neural activation is generally seen.
4. After you have clean data to work with, you can average mean amplitude in a time window. I used 250 to 650ms. So you get one mean value to run statistical tests on. Or you can make a line plot with all the timepoints you want to see the classic N400 peak (hopefully). You usually need a pretty decent sample size for the ERP to show anything meaningful.

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Tags: neuroscience, eeg, language-processing, event-related-potential
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# Question
Title: Is it generally accepted idea that a memory associated with strong olfactory stimuli will be kept longer?
Question: If you go to see flowers and don't smell them, is it likely that you will forget the event easier than when you do smell them? assuming all the other factors are constant.

---

Here's the story.

These days, with my nose always covered by a mask (and only smelling my own breath all the time), I can hardly smell flowers. So, when I went to see flowers last weekend, I guessed that the event will be less memorable than those from previous years.

I'm not in the bio/neuro field, so I wanted to check if my guess was right. After a few hours of search, I concluded that the guess wasn't a bad one. What I learned from the quick search was that: the olfactory system pathway is different from those of visual or auditory systems. For example, optic signals are relayed to the optic chiasm, which locates beneath the hypothalamus, then to the lateral thalamus, then to the visual cortex, which is near the back head. So, they just "pass by" the limbic system. Olfactory signals, on the other hand, are *directed to* the limbic system, parts of which handle emotional memory(amygdala) and long-term memory(hippocampus). Except that I am not sure what that 'handle' exactly means, it seems sensible to me that electric signals directed closer to the part of the brain related to memory are more likely to stimulate memory than those signals that divert the part.

I was happy to learn something new and posted it somewhere. Sadly, one of my distant friends had to disagree with me. She has ph.D. in a somewhat related field (she may have a good reason for that) and she refused(!) to give me a further explanation :(

What did I get wrong?

# Answer
> 1 votes
In general, the answer is no - smell does not enhance memory.

But you are onto something with the proximity of the olfactory cortex to the limbic system: You are not the first to have noticed the special connection that smell might have with emotion and memory. This idea is called the Proust Effect:

> The best known example of the power of smell to evoke memories and emotions is the “Proust effect,” ... The suddenness of the memory, and the strong emotions attached to it, have become symbolic, in both the realm of literary criticism and in sensory physiology, for the power of human taste and smell. ... The olfactory pathway has privileged direct access to \[the prefrontal cortex and limbic system\]; hence the combination of intense emotion and intense cognitive effort experienced ...

To understand this effect, let's first consider context-dependent memory:

> In psychology, context-dependent memory is the improved recall of specific episodes or information when the context present at encoding and retrieval are the same.

This is a well-known and highly robust effect: If you see and smell flowers, then exposure to the same smell (cue) can significantly improve recall of the flowers (target) later. However, smell does not have a privileged position in context-dependent memory - that is, any context information (such as the sounds, location, even the mood you were in) can be equally effective at cueing recall later (Herz, 1998; Herz & Cupchik, 1995).

Most of the research looking at the effect of smell on memory is about the context-dependent memory effect. In these studies, a no-odor control condition is sometimes used where some subjects are exposed to an odor during encoding (memorizing) but no odor is used at recall (remembering). These studies consistently find that **odor during encoding has no effect on memory** unless the same odor is also present at recall (eg, Parker, Ngu, & Cassaday, 2001).

In the above image from Herz (1997) for example, scent must be present in both encoding (study) and recall (test) to have an effect; in other conditions, memory is no better than if no odor is present.

According to the Proust Effect however, when emotion is involved, then odor *can* potentially enhance memory. For example, if you see and smell flowers just as a car accident happens in front of you, AND you happen to come across the same smell later, then it can serve as a powerful recall cue of the event (Toffolo , Smeets, & van den Hout, 2011; Herz, 1997; Wiemers, Sauvage, & Wolf, 2014).

In reality, the smell of flowers is pleasant, and thus you might linger around longer, resulting in improved recall not from the smell, but from paying more attention to your surroundings (Morrin & Ratneshwar, 2003; Krishna, Lwin, & Morrin, 2009; Lwin & Morrin, 2012; Tortell et al, 2007).

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Tags: perception, emotion, memory, sensation, encoding
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# Question
Title: What is the role of dendrites in neural computation?
I read this article: https://news.mit.edu/2019/neurons-dendrite-role-computation-0606

My question is about this: “One hypothesis is that dendritic activity will actually sharpen up for representing features of a task you taught the animals, and all the other dendritic activity, and all the other somatic activity, is going to get dampened down in the rest of the cortical cells that are not involved,” Harnett says.

How exactly are neurons that are involved in a task chosen and how exactly is it decided which neurons are then supposed to be dampened?

Probably not a question that can be easily answered, but I wanted to ask it anyway.

# Answer
> 1 votes
I think our best understanding of this (that I can think of) is Hebb's law: Neurons that fire together wire together. Basically, maybe you can think of it like a bit of information is saved in a physical space neurally. So one idea, like your grandmas face, is a combination of many of these bits being activated (This is in reference to the language of thought theory https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/). When trying to make sense of something, the more common connections will activate first and then less common ones, until an answer has been found or the task has been deemed not possible/unimportant.

As for how neurons are chosen, I would say in relation to what is already there. And dendritic connections are dampened the longer they go without linking. To the best of my knowledge, it's still contested exactly how we encode new information. There is a lot of evidence that certain tasks can be associated to general areas of the neocortex, from neural mapping experiments.

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Tags: neuroscience
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# Question
Title: What comes first? Thought or electric activity?
Our thoughts are basically the result of the electro chemical activity which are happening in our neurons. The signals sent by different neurons to each other back and forth create a pattern which we register as thought/memory. The start of the electrochemical signal is generated by a potential gradient which is present outside the neuron cell membrane and is regulated by different voltage gates via the mechanism of action potential. My doubt is basically asking what comes first? Looking into it, it seems like thoughts result from these activities inside our brain but then how does this activity is brought about? For me, this question is like asking what comes first, the chicken or the egg. Do the electrical synapse somehow form and then we perceive them as thoughts? Then in this way, we shouldn't have control over what we think because the synapses are not voluntary. But we know this is not the case. Our thinking is under our control

Is there an answer?

# Answer
There is ongoing electrical activity in the brain, there's even a lot of it when we are asleep when we are not 'thinking' at all, and also when we are unconscious and even when in coma. When brain activity does cease, i.e., its electrical activity becomes unmeasurable, there's a definite medical emergency.

Thus, there is unceasing activity in the brain. This activity includes both random 'noise' like neuronal jitter (Freeman, 1996) or constitutively active neuronal populations like those in the auditory (Wang & Bergles, 2015) or optic nerves (Sernagor & Grzywacz, 1996), as well as voluntary activity. In turn, the occurrence of random or controlled 'thoughts' is not so strange, as there is ongoing activation of neuronal pathways and activation in one neuron will trigger activity in others.

As a side note, and alluded to in the comments, thoughts are hardly voluntary; think psychotic patients who can experience their thoughts as intrusive or instructing them to do nasty things, people with OCD who have oppressing thoughts they have to do stuff, or folks suffering from PTSD who repeatedly experience flashbacks, nightmares and severe anxiety, as well as uncontrollable thoughts about the event.

As you say, all brain activity eventually boils down to ion gradients in the brain. Every cell in our body needs ion gradients to function properly for that matter.

What comes first? Activity or thoughts? Activity, because even random thoughts need a trigger to occur. How do these impulses come into being? Pre-existing activity.

<sub>**References**
**-** Freeman, *Int J Neural Syst* (1996); **7**(4): 473-80
**-** Sernagor & Grzywacz, *Current Biology* (1996); **6**(11): 1503-8
**-** Wang & Bergles, Cell Tissue Res (2015); **361**(1): 65–75</sub>
> 3 votes

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Tags: neuroscience, theoretical-neuroscience, neurophysiology, brain
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# Question
Title: Is there a term in psychology for when a tool is perceived as an extension of your body?
Is there a specific term that describes the phenomenon where you perceive a tool as an extension of your own body?

An example of this would be when a skilled artist or tradesman has so mastered their craft that when they use a paint brush or wrench their mind extends their consciousness to the object and they use the tool unconsciously.

Another example is riding a bicycle. If you are an experienced cyclist, you are usually not consciously thinking about how you are riding your bicycle. Your mental awareness has expanded to the bicycle and you respond to riding it like it is another limb of your own body

# Answer
**Short answer**
Possible interesting terms are:

* distal attribution (externalization)
* body transfer illusion (rubber hand illusion)
* embodiment

**Background**
This is a very interesting, yet difficult question. I have come up with a few items that may (or may not) be of interest.

Firstly, there is **distal attribution**, also referred to as **externalization**. It is defined by Loomis (1992) as:

> ...\[the phenomenon\] that most of our perceptual experience, though originating with stimulation of our sense organs, is referred to external space beyond the limits of the sensory organs

and by Auvrey *at al*. (2006) as:

> \[the\] ability to attribute the cause of our proximal sensory stimulation to an exterior and distinct object

Distal attribution occurs for instance in **sensory substitution**. Sensory substitution refers to the process of substituting one (dysfunctional) sense with another. A classic example being the guide cane. After training and prolonged use, blind people are reported to experience the information not by haptic feedback perceived in the hands *via* the cane, but to experience the tactile feedback *at the tip of the cane* instead. Thus they *externalize*, or *distally attribute* the tactile feedback in the hand as originating from the tip of the cane.

Another interesting phenomenon that may relate to your question is the **body transfer illusion**, or the **rubber hand illusion** (Ehrsson *et al*., 2005), from Wikipedia:

> The \[study participants\] saw a lifelike rubber left hand in front of them. The experimenters stroked both the subjects hidden left hand and the visible rubber hand with a paintbrush. The experiment showed that if the two hands were stroked synchronously and in the same direction, the subjects began to experience the rubber hand as their own. When asked to use their right hand to point to their left hand, most of the time they pointed toward the rubber hand.

In other words, after some accommodation, the study participants attributed sensory input to their real hand to the fake arm in their visual field.

Thirdly, and lastly there is (prosthesis) **embodiment** (Engdahl *et al*., 2020), *i.e.*,

> the perception of a prosthesis as part of one’s body

This refers to the phenomenon, akin to sensory substitution but in a physically more invasive context and not exclusively related to sensory perception, that implanted prosthetics become experienced as a part of the body. It is a more complicated issue than externalization as discussed above, and is especially important during rehab where *acceptance* is an important part of the process. Embodiment comprises at least two processes, namely:

> An object may be implicitly embodied if some of its properties are processed in the same way as the properties of one’s own body \[...\]. Embodiment may also be experienced more explicitly, as evidenced by affective reactions towards the object, perceptions of ownership, and other subjective feelings.

To conclude with a fourth term used in a more popular sense, it's often said from experienced car drivers that (Urry, 2004):

> The car becomes an *extension* of the driver's body

So *extension* may also be terminology that might be useful, yet it doesn't really harbor any mechanistical explanation as to the *why* or *how* this happens.

<sub>**References**
**-** Auvrey *et al*., *J Integr Neurosci* (2005); **4**(4): 505–21
**-** Ehrsson *et al*., *J Neurosci* (2005); **25**(45): 10564 –73
**-** Engdahl *et al*., *Sci Rep* (2020); **10**: 15471
**-** Loomis, *Presence* (1992); **I**(I): 113-9
**-** Urry, *Theory Culture Soc* (2004); **21**(4-5): 25-39</sub>
> 5 votes

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Tags: consciousness, motor, human-factors, sensory-perception, awareness
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# Question
Title: Is Trauma‐Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy applicable to adults?
Can Trauma‐Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF CBT) be used for adults? I've been told that it is applicable to adults but the literature I've found is all focused on children. Has anyone found this used in connection with adults?

**Reference**

Deblinger, E., Mannarino, A.P., Cohen, J.A., Runyon, M.K. and Steer, R.A. (2011), Trauma‐focused cognitive behavioral therapy for children: impact of the trauma narrative and treatment length. Depress. Anxiety, 28: 67-75. https://doi.org/10.1002/da.20744

# Answer
> 3 votes
While there are major issues surrounding CBT in general, and the clinical studies (see my answer to Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Limitations), the UK charity Mind, points out (Mind, n.d.) that:

> The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) – the organisation that produces guidelines on best practice in health care – currently recommends \[in guideline CG26\] two types of talking treatment for PTSD \[Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder\]

One of them being trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapy (TF-CBT):

> This is a form of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) specifically adapted for PTSD. NICE recommends that you are offered 8–12 regular sessions of around 60–90 minutes, seeing the same therapist at least once a week.

For the studies on weekly therapy, see Why is almost all therapy done as one-hour sessions weekly?

The American Psychological Association (APA) has a write-up on how CBT can supposedly be used to treat PTSD (APA, n.d.) and they reference a book *CBT for anxiety disorders: A practitioner book* with a section on the subject of TF-CBT (Ehlers, 2013)

While a lot of studies on TF-CBT have been focused on supporting child sufferers of PTSD, it reportedly is effective for adults too (Forbes et al., 2007) - Free PDF available from The Pennsylvania State University

> \[W\]hile psychoeducation, AM \[Anxiety Management\] and SIT \[Stress Inoculation Training\] were not as effective as trauma focused CBT or EMDR \[Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing\] as stand-alone interventions, elements of these interventions may well have a role as part of a broader trauma-focused treatment. While models of brief trauma-focused psychodynamic therapy have been developed, they have not been sufficiently tested in controlled studies to derive practice recommendations. Supportive counselling and hypnotherapy have not been found to be effective as stand-alone interventions when compared to trauma-focused CBT or EMDR.

## References

APA (n.d.). *Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)* https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/treatments/cognitive-behavioral-therapy

Ehlers, A. (2013). Trauma-focused cognitive behavior therapy for posttraumatic stress disorder and acute stress disorder. In Simos, G., & Hofmann, S. G. (eds). *CBT for anxiety disorders: A practitioner book* (pp. 161-190). New York, NY: Wiley. http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470975520.html

Forbes, D., Creamer, M., Phelps, A., Bryant, R., McFarlane, A., Devilly, G. J., ... & Newton, S. (2007). Australian guidelines for the treatment of adults with acute stress disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. *Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 41*(8), 637-648. https://doi.org/10.1080%2F00048670701449161

Mind (n.d.). *Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)* https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/types-of-mental-health-problems/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd-and-complex-ptsd/treatment/

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Tags: cbt
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# Question
Title: 'Describe this object to me' - To work out what type of thought process you have. What is this test called?
A friend learned heard about a test while on a Myers Briggs course and described it to me. I thought it was interesting, but I can't find anything about it since I don't know what to search for.

The instructor says 'tell me about this \[object\]'

One type of person will say a few factual observations

> It's a red book

Another type will give you a firehose of information

> People learn things from it, it's old so its probably had a few people read it, they probably really loved the book, ...

Is there a well known test like this? Is there anything term I can google to learn more?

There is a discussion of it here too. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/731/what-lies-beneath/act-two-5

# Answer
> 1 votes
The test you seem to be talking about is often referred to by different names, but the name used by The Myers & Briggs Foundation\[1\] and most of the papers on the subject\[2\] is MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator).

PS:

1. I did my best to identify it according to your description, but leave a comment if it's not the test you had in mind.
2. It is important to add that this test is often regarded as pseudoscience and has several fundamental issues \[3\]

\[1\] https://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-basics/ \[2\] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as\_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22Myers-Briggs+Type+INdicator%22&btnG= \[3\] https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/give-and-take/201309/goodbye-mbti-the-fad-won-t-die

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Tags: personality, test
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# Question
Title: Thinking, Fast and Slow vs. Mindfulness vs. Flow
I've been wondering how dual-process theory, which is described in Daniel Kahneman's book "Thinking, Fast and Slow", relates to mindfulness and the state of being in the present moment and the flow experiences coined by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi.

1. Dual-process theory describes two different ways the brain forms thoughts, as described on Wikipedia:

> * System 1: Fast, automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotypic, subconscious
> * System 2: Slow, effortful, infrequent, logical, calculating, conscious

2. Mindfulness is defined on Wikipedia as follows:

> Mindfulness is "the intentional, accepting and non-judgmental focus of one's attention on the emotions, thoughts and sensations occurring in the present moment", which can be trained by meditational practices.

3. The flow or zone experiences, on the other hand, are defined as follows:

> In positive psychology, flow, also known as zone, is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.

How do these relate? Do they overlap, mutually exclude each other or are the same thing or can exist at the same time independently?

Are there any brain studies that would compare the brain's response under each of those states?

# Answer
> 14 votes
**Short answer:** Dual-process, mindfulness and flow theory are related by way of attention theory. Two previous posts that may be of interest are "What is the relation between concepts, constructs and measures?" and "How can we realize when a sociological question is impossible to answer?".

## Commensurability

This is an apt example of what Thomas Kuhn would have called a question of **commensurability**. In normal terms, commensurability means the extent to which we can or cannot talk about two or more theories within a common framework, while *in*commensurability is a fancy way of saying we're comparing apples to farming equipment or dress shirts. In order for two theories in the cognitive sciences to be commensurable, they generally need to satisfy two criteria:

1. **A common conceptual denominator.**
2. **At least one common construct.**

If they satisfy these, then can look for comparable ways of operationalizing and measuring these comparable constructs that can be related to the common concept. In other words, two theories are comparable if they are conceptually related AND conceive of this concept in some at least partially related way.

## Dual-process, mindfulness and flow theory: commensurable?

In this case, there is a clear common conceptual denominator, and that is **attention**, although they differ in how they express that denominator. For Kahneman and Tversky, there is a generalized resource allocation mechanism which produces qualitatively different modes of thinking; for mindfulness, there exists a discrete mental state partly characterized by a particular attentional pattern; for flow theory, there exists another discrete mental state partly characterized by another attentional pattern.

We can therefore talk about these theories *in principle*, although how effective our ability to do so turns out to be will depend on the merits of the underlying theory of attention. For example, it is meaningful to ask whether meditational practice involves fast or slow thinking, or whether flow states may be considered a form of meditation, and so forth, but only insofar as we can state those questions in terms of a third (attentional) theory. If one of the theories had assumed that attention was infinite, for example, it would be incommensurable with the other two.

## Concluding remarks

A direct three-way comparison of these theories does not exist in the literature. It is possible that someone has directly related one theory to the other for each combination of theories, but it would take three fairly extensive literature searches (dual-process/mindfulness, dual-process/flow, mindfulness/flow). Even if these comparisons actually exist, summarizing them all would almost certainly be beyond the scope of a single SE answer, so I will leave it at this generalized answer.

I think your question about whether these theories are related by neuroimaging evidence is a good intuition, but establishing that similar brain areas are involved in the same behavior does not provide evidence that these are the same, because brain function is dynamic and areas therefore 'have' many functions. It's not just about what areas are active, but also when they are active, in what order they are active, the exact quality of the activity and where the areas are getting input from and sending output to.

# Answer
> -1 votes
A novel procedure for linking flow and mindful states, quickly refutable with a good swift kick.

The ideal for any scientist with a great idea is to be able to explain it in a minute, and to confirm or falsify it as quickly. The world record for this arguably goes to the English philosopher Samuel Johnson, who rejected Archbishop Berkeley’s argument that material things only exist in one’s mind by striking his foot against a large stone while proclaiming, “I refute it thusly!”

Here is a similarly novel and useful idea that can be confirmed or refuted with a proverbial large kick, and can also be easily explained through affective neuroscience (links below).

Basic Facts: Endogenous opioids are induced when we eat, drink, have sex, and relax. Their affective correlate, or how it ‘feels’, is a sense of pleasure.

Fun Fact: When we are concurrently perceiving some activity that has a variable and unexpected rate of reward while consuming something pleasurable, opioid activity increases and with it a higher sense of pleasure. In other words, popcorn tastes better when we are watching an exciting movie than when we are watching paint dry. The same effect occurs when we are performing highly variable or meaningful activity (creating art, doing good deeds, doing productive work) while in a pleasurable relaxed state. (Meaning would be defined as behavior that has branching novel positive implications). This is commonly referred to as ‘flow’ or ‘peak’ experience.

So why does this occur? Dopamine-Opioid interactions: or the fact that dopamine activity (elicited by positive novel events, and responsible for a state of arousal, but not pleasure) interacts with our pleasures (as reflected by mid brain opioid systems), and can actually stimulate opioid release, which is reflected in self-reports of greater pleasure.

Proof (or kicking the stone): Just get relaxed using a relaxation protocol such as mindfulness, and then follow it by exclusively attending to or performing meaningful activity, and avoiding all distraction. Keep it up and you will not only stay relaxed, but continue so with a greater sense of wellbeing or pleasure. (In other words, this is a procedural bridge between mindful and ‘flow’ experiences that are not unique psychological ‘states’, but merely represent special aspects of resting states.)

A Likely Explanation, as if you need one! A more formal explanation from a neurologically based learning theory of this technique is provided on pp. 44-51 in a little open-source book on the psychology of rest linked below. (The flow experience discussed on pp. 81-86.) The book is based on the work of the distinguished affective neuroscientist Kent Berridge, who was kind to review for accuracy and endorse the work.

Implications for meditation and stress management: The modulation of pleasurable affect induced by rest is not dependent upon a species of attention (focal meditation, mindfulness meditation), but is ‘schedule dependent’, or correlates with the variability of contingencies of reward and the discriminative aspects of incentives (i.e. their cognitive implications). In other words, affect in resting is not static but dynamic, as the opioid systems activated by resting protocols are always modulated by dynamic or phasic changes in dopamine systems that are induced by concurrently perceived positive act-outcome discrepancies or expectancies.

References:

Rauwolf, P., et al. (2021) Reward uncertainty - as a 'psychological salt'- can alter the sensory experience and consumption of high-value rewards in young healthy adults. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (prepub) https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fxge0001029

The Psychology of Rest https://www.scribd.com/doc/284056765/The-Book-of-Rest-The-Odd-Psychology-of-Doing-Nothing

The Psychology of Incentive Motivation https://www.scribd.com/document/495438436/A-Mouse-s-Tale-a-practical-explanation-and-handbook-of-motivation-from-the-perspective-of-a-humble-creature

Meditation and Rest, from International Journal of Stress Management, by this author https://www.scribd.com/doc/121345732/Relaxation-and-Muscular-Tension-A-bio-behavioristic-explanation

Berridge Lab, University of Michigan https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/berridge-lab/

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, decision-making, attention, positive-psychology, meditation
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# Question
Title: What scientific evidence is there for the definable real world quality of redness independent our perception?
'With light poise and counter-poise, Nature oscillates within prescribed limits. Yet thus all arise the varieties and conditions of the phenomena which are present to us in space and time.' - Goethe

The touchstone of Newton's theory was his famous experiment with the prism. A prism breaks a beam of white light into a rainbow of colors, spread across a whole visible spectrum. Then Newton realized that must be the elementary components that add up to create white.

While Newton used the standard prism, and passed white light through it, Goethe had also run a series of experiments, with a prism again, but by just looking through the prism.

And he found everything uniform, but when his prism passed through the fold of a cloud behind the sun, he was met with a blast of color, where he stated that 'color is the interchange of light and shadow.'

Goethe's ideas resemble a facile notion, popular among psychologists, but Feigenbaum argued that his (*i.e.*, Goethe's) statement had true science in them which emphasized the repeatability of his experiments.

It was the perception of color, to both Goethe and Feigenbaum, that was universal and objective.

So in that sense, what scientific evidence is there for the definable real world quality of redness independent our perception?

# Answer
**Short answer**
None.

**Background**
First off, I am not familiar with the principles as laid out in your question posed by Goethe and Feigenbaum (I'll look into these people, thanks for the pointer!).

However, I am familiar with Newton and with the interpretation of perception in general. Importantly, the late Neuroscientist Paul Bach-y-Rita famously stated that (1972):

> We see with the brain, not the eyes.

What he meant by that is that the brain has the ability to consciously *perceive* physical input. The eye serves to *sense* light and convey an electrical signal to the brain that translates the sensations to perceptions. The retina is sensitive to different wavelengths and red light activates different photosensitive cells (cones) than green or blue cones. The perceptual analogue arises only after extensive processing in higher brain centers.

In a series of experiments Bach-y-Rita showed that blind people are able to 'see with the skin' by converting camera images to tactile sensations on the body, a technique dubbed sensory substitution (Bach-y-Rita, 1969). Later, he founded a company (Wicab) that developed a sensory-substitution device on this principle, namely the BrainPort V100 (Stronks *et al*., 2016) (Fig. 1) that converts camera images to electrical stimuli on the tongue via a grid of 240 electrodes (the tongue display unit, or TDU) (Stronks *et al*., 2015). So a TDU allows people to '**taste the light**'. These experiments showed that visual perceptions can be elicited by tactile stimulations, later corroborated by functional brain imaging, and thus that we see with the brain, not the eyes.

Having said all this it brings me back to your question...

> \[W\]hat scientific evidence is there for the definable real world quality of redness independent our perception?

... and my answer on it would be: none.

Fig. 1. BrainPort V100 wearer. source: Independent

**References**
**-** Bach-y-Rita, Nature (1969); **221**: 963-4
**-** Bach-y-Rita *et al*., *Int J Human-Comp Interact* (1972); **15**(2): 285-95
**-** Stronks *et al*., *Brain Res* (2015); **1624**: 140-52
**-** Stronks *et al*. *Exp Rev Med Dev* (2016); **13**(10): 919-31
> 1 votes

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Tags: neuroscience, perception, philosophy-of-mind, color, sensory-perception
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# Question
Title: Is practice more effective if spaced over time?
Example: Say Alice and Bob want to learn to pride a bike. Alice practices for an hour every day. Bob practices for 7 hours each saturday. They are both getting the same amount of practice. Which of them learns faster?

This question is about spaced vs mass learning with respect, specifically, to procedural memory. I have been able to find some research on spaced repetition of flash card memorisation, but that is declarative memory, which might be different.

Have any studies been done on this, to determine the optimal duration/spacing of practice sessions for procedural learning?

# Answer
There are probably too many different possible variables here to make any broad declarations of which specific interval is most effective.

There are "between session" improvements in procedural memory, which may result from consolidation of memory especially during sleep. There can also be between session decays as learned skills deteriorate over time. Optimizing the between session change is the key factor in optimizing time spent training vs improvement.

Hauptmann et al. 2005 found that in the specific context they tested, "between session" improvements were optimized when subjects stopped training at the point of saturation of learning. That is, they practiced in one session until they stopped seeing improvement during that session to optimize the total learning per time practiced. The specific amount of time spent training before saturation was not the same for all subjects.

It isn't clear how broadly applicable this finding would be, and in the context of physically demanding tasks like sport there could easily be non-mental factors that dominate: for example, if your training saturates because you are injuring yourself, you may be physically limited in training rather than mentally limited.

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Brashers-Krug, T., Shadmehr, R., & Bizzi, E. (1996). Consolidation in human motor memory. Nature, 382(6588), 252.

Diekelmann, S., & Born, J. (2010). The memory function of sleep. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(2), 114.

Hauptmann, B., Reinhart, E., Brandt, S. A., & Karni, A. (2005). The predictive value of the leveling off of within session performance for procedural memory consolidation. Cognitive Brain Research, 24(2), 181-189.

Karni, A., Tanne, D., Rubenstein, B. S., Askenasy, J. J., & Sagi, D. (1994). Dependence on REM sleep of overnight improvement of a perceptual skill. Science, 265(5172), 679-682.
> 3 votes

# Answer
Space Repetition is an effective learning method for both procedural and declarative learning. However it cannot replace practicing the skill in real life.

Some references:
> 2 votes

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Tags: learning, procedural-memory
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title: Why there are tomboy but no Tomgirls?

text:
# Question
Title: Why there are tomboy but no Tomgirls?
Tomboys are girls who behave like men but most of them are not transgender and lesbian.

But why there are no tomgirls, boys who behave like girls but are not transgender and homosexual?

What is the the reason?

# Answer
> 5 votes
Who said there aren't? Tomgirl isn't the term used, but I am sure there are straight men who have feminine traits out there. I think this is called **effeminacy**. Here's the Wikipedia link for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effeminacy.

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Tags: gender
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# Question
Title: Is survival instinct trained from pain or born with?
So are instincts such as not touching fire or don’t touch sharp points trained out because we felt pain from them first (or heard it’ll bring pain from other)? Or are those instinct born with us?

# Answer
Survival instinct in neuroscience has also been called a "fight or flight" response (Cannon 1929). It refers to the natural instinct of animals (humans included) in response to fear. This response has a neuroscientific basis and involved several brain regions. When a threat is perceived it activates the amygdala (known to be responsible for emotions), autonomic nervous system (that control involuntary function such as heart rate and breath), and facilitates the release of cortisol (stress hormone) and adrenaline.

This brain circuit is already present at birth and constitutes the first and impulsive response to threat. It is an evolutionary instinct developed by humans when predators threatened survival chances.

However, growing up, there are several other components to consider in "survival instinct response". There is surely a learning component given by pain. Pain act as preservation, pushing us away from what is dangerous for us. An example can be fire. We were not born with the idea that fire is a threaten, however when we first touch it we feel pain. The feeling of pain at fire contact makes us learn that fire is bad for our survival, it is painful to touch. Therefore, in the future, we will have cortisol and adrenaline discharge when we are pushed towards fire sources.

To conclude and answer the question:

* We are born with fight or flight instinct (mind that there is always an exception to the norm). This instinct is our primary response to possible threats to our life.
* There is a learning component involving pain that refines our instinct. Pain teaches us important lessons on what else it is important to add to our threat list. Furthermore, this instinct can be inhibited (with training or drugs).

References:

* Milosevic, I., & McCabe, R. E. (Eds.). (2015). Phobias: The Psychology of Irrational Fear: The Psychology of Irrational Fear. ABC-CLIO.
* Jansen, A. S., Van Nguyen, X., Karpitskiy, V., Mettenleiter, T. C., & Loewy, A. D. (1995). Central command neurons of the sympathetic nervous system: basis of the fight-or-flight response. Science, 270(5236), 644-646.
* McCarty, R. (2016). The fight-or-flight response: A cornerstone of stress research. In Stress: Concepts, cognition, emotion, and behavior (pp. 33-37). Academic Press.
* Derakhshan, A., Mikaeili, M., Nasrabadi, A. M., & Gedeon, T. (2019). Network physiology of ‘fight or flight response in facial superficial blood vessels. Physiological measurement, 40(1), 014002.
> 4 votes

# Answer
I suppose, you meant `"Is survival instinct just a consequence of pain, or is it something different, independent?"` And this is quite a good question, because in most cases pain feeling appear together with survival instinct (for example, fights or fire), and it's hard to understand what exactly leads a person.

It's also good to consider pain as a part of self-preservation, together with fear (of pain).

Unfortunately, I haven't found any clear answer, but there are several clues and researches of related topics.

1. Some rare people feel no pain. However, there are 2 separate diseases: congenital insensitivity to pain and congenital indifference to pain. Both of them lead to higher death rate comparing to normal people, but indifference to pain leads to a bit smaller death rate than insensitivity to pain. We can make a conclusion, that understanding of dangerous situations helps people survive without feeling pain. Thus, survival instinct differs from feeling pain (at least in some cases).
2. Statistics shows that death rate of people feeling no pain is very high in childhood and decreases over the years. Again, we see that experience shapes the awareness of dangers, and people learn to avoid them even without feeling pain.
3. There are researches that distinguish and measure separately fear of dying (which can be understood as self-preservation, fear of pain) and fear of being dead (which can be understood as fear of death itself), and they obtain different results. This is another evidence of inequity of survival instinct and (fear of) feeling pain.

To conclude, we can suppose that survival instinct consists of self-preservation (feeling pain and fear of it) and Moree high-level fear of death itself.

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References:

1. David E. Comings, George D. Amromin: Autosomal dominant insensitivity to pain with hyperplastic myelinopathy and autosomal dominant indifference to pain
2. Lora-Jean Collett & David Lester: The Fear of Death and the Fear of Dying
> 2 votes

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Tags: learning, survival
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# Question
Title: Effect of having false confidence because of confusion of familiarity and knowledge
What is the name of the effect which causes one to skip information that feel familiar during learning due to the confusion of familiarity and knowledge?

# Answer
> 2 votes
Change blindness: failure to notice large changes to the visual scene \[1\].

If you are interested in familiarity change blindness I suggest this article \[2\].

Reference:

\[1\] Simons, D. J., & Levin, D. T. (1997). Change blindness. Trends in cognitive sciences, 1(7), 261-267.

\[2\] Tovey, M., & Herdman, C. M. (2014). Seeing changes: How familiarity alters our perception of change. Visual Cognition, 22(2), 214-238.

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, learning, terminology
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# Question
Title: In an experiment with animated stimuli, should I accept answers during Animation Time and count it into the Response Time?
In an experimental task where the response time is an important variable to compare two groups with different conditions, and there are animated stimuli (movement), should the response be accepted during the movement and the animation time be included in the response time measurement?

For instance, suppose that I have a categorization-like task where there are two kinds of movements for the objects, and those movements are presented through a 500ms animation. If a participant manages to notice the expected answer before the animation ends and press the button in, like, 450ms, should I accept this response?

I'm worried that some participants might wait until it's finished to answer while some others might not, and that might add some noise which I'm not sure about the significance (maybe for lack of experience).

# Answer
> 2 votes
You could solve this problem telling your participant that they have to answer as soon as they spot the right answer or if you do not want them to answer before the end of the stimuli you can disable answers before the end of the stimuli (normally you write what you expect in the experiment introduction screen).

If you let (want) your participant to answer as soon as they spot the right answer then you should consider as time response the time they took to answer. In concrete: if the stimuli are presented at time 0 and last 200ms and your participant answer at time 50ms you should record them as answer time 50ms.

As far as I understood you are interested in seeing how long it takes for your participants to spot the right answer. So if you wait till the end of the stimuli for recording their answer you might just see how fast they are in pressing the bottom and not how fast they spot the right answer.

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, methodology, experimental-psychology, experiment-design, experimental-neuroscience
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# Question
Title: Does being sporty affect a person's reaction to emergency situations?
I have always been quite sporty, and I tend to remain relatively calm and composed in emergency or high stress situations. From my personal experience, people who are quite sporty and have been in their youth tend to be more as well, and panic or freeze less fast than less sporty people.

I could imagine that doing a lot of exercise, and perhaps competitive sports, could make your body more used to adrenaline or cortisol and thus teach your body and mind to be calmer in such situations.

Or course, personal experience means very little (and admittedly, I have not even been in all that many "emergency" situations), and I may be somewhat biased. So is there any research that shows (or refutes) a relation between regular exercise (and/or having done a lot of exercise in your youth, or competitive sports) and a person's reaction to emergency or high stress situations?

# Answer
> 1 votes
Check this out. Chapter 15 is what you are looking for. It is a study made in collaboration with the international federation of sport and medicine and talks about sport and fight or flight response (panic response). Click here

Kraemer, W. J., & Rogol, A. D. (Eds.). (2005). The endocrine system in sports and exercise. Blackwell Pub..

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Tags: neuroscience, stress, exercise, sport-psychology
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# Question
Title: If you can't draw, is that an indication of low spatial IQ?
People who can draw obviously can visualize space and objects in their mind. Therefore, people who can't draw obviously cannot. So does that mean that people who can't draw must have low spatial IQ?

# Answer
Spatial IQ refers to the ability to perform navigation tasks, mental representation, and mental rotation of objects. Therefore, if you have a clear idea or 3D model in mind of what you want to draw but you are not able to reproduce it on paper, I would say does not mean you have a low spatial IQ.

Simple answer:

No. Bad drawing does not mean low spatial IQ

However, the inability of drawing can depend on other factors. Check Neglect syndrome and clock-drawing test.
> 2 votes

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Tags: iq, spatial-cognition
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# Question
Title: What is the minimum spatial IQ needed to solve the rubik's cube?
Solving the rubki's cube is bona fide spatial IQ challenge.

Has there been studies done on the minimum spatial IQ score needed to solve it?

EDIT:

By solve, I mean to discover the algorithm by oneself.

# Answer
I don't think it's a matter of IQ, really. Here's why: The Rubik's cube can be solved easily following a simple algorithm. Anyone can follow this step-by-step process mindlessly and solve a Rubik's cube. Remembering the algorithm is a different thing altogether, maybe that depends on a person's IQ (does memory depend on IQ?) There are many bots that can solve the Rubik's cube in a matter of seconds, just following this algorithm. So, it actually doesn't need much IQ I guess, but considering that the algorithm generally starts from the step after one side (usually black/white/yellow) is completed, a person should have enough IQ to be able to solve one face of the cube and remember the steps, so I am guessing that the IQ measure would be around the room temperature in Celsius scale!
> 1 votes

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Tags: spatial-cognition
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