# Question
Title: Does individual understanding or perception, determine dream lucidity?
Does dream lucidity come with understanding the mechanisms of the world, age, or something else?

# Answer
> 4 votes
I am unsure if you mean, if the ability to lucid dream comes with age? or if the type or degree of lucidity within the dream is different depending on the individual? So I will aim for a ballpark answer.

Lucid dreaming defined by a dream in which the dreamer is – while dreaming – aware that she/he is dreaming (Schredl & Erlacher, 2004).

A variety of different factors have been found to influence lucid dreaming. Though most people report having had a lucid dream at least once in their lives, only about 20% of the population reports having lucid dreams once amonth or more (Snyder & Gackenbach, 1988; in LaBerge, 1990).

Contrary to your suggestion, lucid dreaming has not been found to come with age, but rather is more common before the age of 16 (Voss & Frenzel, 2012). Additionally, much research has shown evidence supporting the idea that one can train oneself to lucid dream, hence suggesting that lucid dreaming does is not necessarily influenced by ones understanding of the world but rather is an acquired skill (see: Price & Cohen, 1988; LaBerge, 1980). However, it can perhaps be influenced by an individuals experience for example one study found a positive correlation between lucid dream instances and time spent playing video games (Gackenbach, 2006).

**References:**

Gackenbach, J. (2006). Video game play and lucid dreams: Implications for the development of consciousness. Dreaming, 16(2), 96.

LaBerge, S. P. (1980). Lucid dreaming as a learnable skill: A case study. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 51(3f), 1039-1042.

LaBerge, S., & Verified, L. D. P. (1990). Lucid dreaming: Psychophysiological studies of consciousness during REM sleep.

Price, R. F., & Cohen, D. B. (1988). Lucid dream induction. In Conscious mind, sleeping brain (pp. 105-134). Springer New York

Schredl, M. & Erlacher, D. (2004). Lucid dreaming frequency and personality. Personality and Individual Differences, 37(7), 1463-1473.

Voss, U., Frenzel, C., KOPPEHELE‐GOSSEL, J. U. D. I. T. H., & Hobson, A. (2012). Lucid dreaming: an age‐dependent brain dissociation. Journal of sleep research, 21(6), 634-642.

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Tags: developmental-psychology, dreams
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# Question
Title: Drawing Parallels Between Finance and Psychology: A Psychology Metaphor
This question starts out with some finance theory to set the scene:

**Background**

Let's consider the stock price of Google (the value of holding a share in Google). The volatility in Google's stock price is the degree of variation in that price. An implied volatility can be derived from the market price of an option.

An option is an instrument which gives the buyer a right to buy or sell a particular stock in the future at a particular price, if they want to. Volatility is one of the inputs required to price (determine the correct value) of an option. It is the range in which a a stock price is expected to fluctuate.

Organisations are often considered as organisms. Organic metaphors are often used to describe how organisations work.

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**Question**

If I was to use psychology to create a metaphor for volatility, what theory could I use?

If stock price is an individuals self worth or self esteem and an option price is their outlook on what their self worth might be at a point in the future. Finance theory would suggest that a correct view of future self worth would require something comparable to volatility.

Does it sound reasonable to consider volatility as emotional modulation? Emotional dysregulation at one end of the scale, a level head at the other? Is there a psychological term for level head?

Any good reading you would suggest to help me continue this comparison/analysis?

# Answer
> 2 votes
Classically, we might call emotional volatility **neuroticism.** We could also refer to a continuum of **affective reactivity** (high vs. low reactivity; e.g., Gross, Sutton, & Ketelaar, 1998).

**Emotion dysregulation** need not imply emotional volatility. For example, depressed patients show stable depressed mood or **emotional inertia** (Brose et al., 2014), which is related to impaired **affective updating** under stress (Pe et al., 2015) and perseverative thinking (Nolen-Hoeksema, Wisco, & Lyubomirsky, 2008).

A lot of these ideas can be pushed under the umbrella of **affective dynamics**, or how affect/emotions change over time (for recent theory, see this special issue of *Emotion Review*, 2015).

We can also say that fluctuations in affect represent deviations from **allostasis** (Sterling, 2013), which motivate us to engage in self-regulatory behaviors that bring us back to allostasis (Inzlicht, Bartholow, & Hirsch, 2015).

As part of a predictive regulation framework, emotional instability may result from feedback dynamics between positive and negative predictions about the world (Eldar et al., 2015; see the image below). Relatedly, maladaptive priors and associated attentional biases (i.e., inappropriately weighted prediction errors) may also account for volatility (Huys, Daw, & Dayan, 2015).

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Tags: emotion
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# Question
Title: How does one identify relevant variables when performing research on perception?
Suppose, hypothetically, that I wanted to do a blind taste test into preference for Coke or Pepsi. I organize hundreds of volunteers and find that a certain group prefers one and another group the other.

As I work for some marketing company, they ask me to account for this. After all, they reason, preference for Coke vs Pepsi is not random.

Perhaps there's a socioeconomic explanation, perhaps it relates to gender, hormones, age or ethnicity. Who knows! There are hundreds of variables commonly studied in the academic community.

Even if I find a couple of variables that correlate, say hypothetically, BMI and employment status, I have no way to determine if those are "good" variables or if this is just a coincidence.

How are researchers in psych experiments trained to deal with this sort of scenario?

# Answer
You use the words "experiment" and "correlate" somewhat loosely in your question, but there are various ways that we can address the general idea in a more rigourous way. Let's consider two possible situations:

(1) You randomly put people into two groups and found that group A likes pepsi much more often than group B.

(2) You had an idea that people with, say, higher employment status would be more likely to like pepsi. So you deliberately split people into A (managers) and B (subordinates) and found that group A likes pepsi more often.

If the situation is (1), and the difference in preferences is a large one, then you might want to look at the groups and see in what ways they are different. It would be perfectly fine to observe that the groups were different on, say, BMI, and you could speculate that that is why one group prefers pepsi more often. But it wouldn't be very convincing because there could be many other ways that A and B differ, some of which you probably haven't even thought of or can't measure, and there is no way of being sure which factors align with preferences, let alone what causes them.

The situation (2) is much closer to a "true" experiment. Based on previous research or results you could isolate a particular factor and make sure that the groups differ only in that way. In more refined experiments you could try to exclude potential confounding variables (e.g., by making sure your managers and subordinates were all the same sex, and had equal BMI). Ideally, you could even try to manipulate the factor within the same participants and see if preferences changed (e.g., if a subordinate gets promoted, do they change their preferences when you test them a year later).
> 1 votes

# Answer
Researchers are trained to address this problem by using literature reviews to isolate the specific variables that should be of most interest. At the start of research you generally examine the knowns and unknowns in the particular area of interest, so as to determine the state of the art in that area. Once you know the state of the art you have a better idea of how to proceed with the research.

For example, if you found that something was known about your research area then you could use this literature to justify looking at a specific set of variables when examining the problem. This relevant prior literature need not have examined the exact same area as the problem you are looking at. For example, if you were looking at factors that influence preferences for coke and pepsi you could look at research that examined brand preferences, or even something more fundamental such as the factors that lead to positive beliefs and attitudes. This research would give you an idea as to which particular variables were most deserving of consideration.

Depending on the extent that you could argue that little was known about the particular problem, you could also consider doing exploratory or descriptive research to attempt to identify or categorize the different variables involved. In this case you might use an interview to get some factors that set up your experiment and then use experiment to assess their relative impacts on the behaviour.
> 2 votes

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Tags: methodology, experimental-psychology
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# Question
Title: Color and shape arriving together in visual system
I know that in the visual cortex there are separate visual pathways for both color and shape. Do these separate pathways imply that human beings become consciously aware of these features separately or are they bound unconsciously?

# Answer
> 4 votes
It is something of an oversimplification to say that

> there are separate visual pathways for both color and shape.

There are many cells, even in V1, which are selective for both colour and shape (or at least orientation). While there are regions more sensitive to some features than others, there are plenty of neurons which combine features. It is also not clear what you mean by becoming conscious of these features separately. Clearly, we can know both that there is something red in front of us and that it is a square. You may have also experienced a flash of a colour without knowing the form, so in that sense, they are separable in consciousness.

The combination of these things is indeed a difficult problem akin to the binding problem. Bruce's answer gives some good background and here is a paper about binding in vision. More generally, binding in feature integration theory requires features to be linked to locations (plausible given topographical organisation in cortex).

# Answer
> 0 votes
They are bound unconsciously, and this is known as the binding problem. You can make experiments (using very short durations and/or "masks") however, to interfere with this process. The result is that sometimes you consciously bind the wrong color and shape.

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Tags: vision, theoretical-neuroscience, consciousness
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# Question
Title: do monkeys imitate humans sometimes just for fun?
Is it possible that sometimes when monkeys stand up on their two legs they are just imitating humans in order to communicate or have fun?

# Answer
I can break this down into three questions.

*(1) Do monkeys imitate? Do they ever imitate humans?*

The answer to these questions is yes, though I don't know if that includes standing on two legs.

*(2) Do they do it to communicate?*

Well, it is difficult to define what communication and with whom we are interested in here, but monkeys (and humans) do seem to be able to recognise when they are are being imitated. So at least the potential for communication is there.

*(3) Do they do it to have fun?*

There is plenty of evidence that monkeys "play", and depending on one's definition we can infer that they are having fun. Some play involves imitation.

For example this study by Byrne (2005) is an interesting source for some of the above answers, and in particular the "social mirroring" type of imitation implies some communication and theory of mind. We should also be careful here to distinguish between monkeys and apes, some of these behaviours are disputed in different species.
> 3 votes

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Tags: humour
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# Question
Title: Why don't people listen to smart people?
Generally speaking, I feel like there are two things everyone can agree on when it comes to intellectuals:

1. They don't know everything.
2. They know more than me (at least about a particular topic).

It's #2 that's tripping me up. The words of a Know-It-All are usually very poorly received (at least in Western culture). We don't consider intelligence as a meaningful criteria for political office, we bully them in schools, and even tell them to their faces that they're wrong about scientific/mathematical concepts that we admit to not understanding! When a problem arises in our lives, they are the last people we want to hear from. We instead run to the counsel of our family, friends, and other people who many times know *even less* about the problem than we do!

But why? Everything we have as a species is owed to our brains. If they really do know more than us, it would be in our best interest to revere them, no?

Have there been any studies done that would explain why people generally don't listen to smart people?

# Answer
> 16 votes
David Dunning and Justin Kruger have observed that, related to skill competency, individuals which are incompetent in a certain skill can exhibit a cognitive bias, called the Dunning-Kruger effect, which leads them to:

* fail to recognize their own lack of skill
* fail to recognize genuine skill in others
* fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy
* recognize and acknowledge their own lack of skill, but only after they are exposed to training for that skill

While the study focuses exclusively on why people can or cannot measure their strenghts and weaknesses correctly, there was an interesting subsequent study where the authors were lead by the fascination that certain incompetent poor performers fail to ever improve. They have concluded that such individuals have an apparent lack of self-insight, which leads to exhibit incorrect logic and defensive mechanisms which fixate their views even against continuous feedback and encouragement to improve.

This certainly remains a complex phenomena which we could, from experience, observe in different forms. Based on the suggestions from the last study, it seems that this becomes an issue with individuals that have not conceived intelligence as being malleable. Apparently, they may not have been instilled to value intelligence and encouraged to approach learning and the refinement of it's processes for the betterment of one's own intelligence as an endeavor which is to be considered as rewarding.

Effectively, being that they consider intelligence as something that is fixated, failing to generate excitement when they engage others that attempt to challenge and broaden it seems to lead to the difficulties at hand, such as: I do not understand you and I am certain I never will, so I choose to continuously ignore you because I do not want to feel this discomfort that arises from knowing that I am invariably incompetent, which you and I both know is not a good thing.

# Answer
> 9 votes
I would add that there's a series of recent studies of what the authors called the 'equality bias'. I don't think they provide a mechanism, jut point to a rather suboptimal way of social decision making.

I copy here their own summary (better description than any I could give):

"When making decisions together, we tend to give everyone an equal chance to voice their opinion. To make the best decisions, however, each opinion must be scaled according to its reliability. Using behavioral experiments and computational modelling, we tested (in Denmark, Iran, and China) the extent to which people follow this latter, normative strategy. We found that people show a strong equality bias: they weight each other’s opinion equally regardless of differences in their reliability, even when this strategy was at odds with explicit feedback or monetary incentives."

Mahmoodi et al, 2015. PNAS 112(12), 3835–3840, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1421692112 http://www.pnas.org/content/112/12/3835.abstract

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Tags: social-psychology
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# Question
Title: How does psychoanalytic theory explain the way in which projection works?
According to psychoanalytic theory, people sometimes defend against their own unwanted motives, conflicts, and behavioral tendencies by identifying them and decrying them in other people. This has been called projection.

I don't understand the reasoning behind **Projection** as a **Defense Mechanism**. I mean, why tell someone they lie when you are the one prone to lying? Why accuse other people of something they haven't done but what you most likely would do if you were in their position? In what way does this tendency help to deal with inner conflicts according to psychoanalytic theory?

# Answer
**Short answer:**

Interestingly, even though the notion of projection has been intuitively appealing and plausible to many, the psychoanalytic explanation of how projection works has always been vague.

**Long answer:**

Sigmund Freud (1915) defined the "mechanism of projection" by explaining that engaging in it, the "ego" of a person "expels whatever within itself becomes a cause of unpleasure" (p. 136).

In a similar way, Anna Freud, who later worked on clarifying various defense mechanisms further, thought that projection allows people to get rid of painful thoughts: "The effect of the mechanism of projection is to break the connection between the ideational representatives of dangerous instinctual impulses and the ego" (p. 122).

Critics have noted that psychoanalytic writings have never explicated how exactly (by which process) projecting negative thoughts to others helps them in disconnecting these thoughts from the self.

Pointing to these criticisms and noting that empirical evidence in support of defensive projection has been scarce, Baumeister, Dale, and Sommer (1998, p. 1091), summarize

> In retrospect, it was never clear how seeing another person as dishonest (for example) would enable the individual to avoid recognizing his or her own dishonesty. The notion that projection would effectively mask one’s own bad traits was perhaps incoherent.

Newman, Duff, and Baumeister (1997) propose and test an alternative, social-cognitive account of defensive projection. They posit that people often try hard to suppress unwanted thoughts. However, ironically, doing so makes such tthoughts all the more accessible (because when you try not to think about something, you constantly think about it). These accessible thoughts can then also color people's impression of others. This would then just be a by-product of trying to suppress unwanted thoughts about the self and not the core of a defense mechanism.

In addition, it is important to note that the term projection is also used in a more general sense, to describe people's tendency to overestimate the presence of their own characteristics, beliefs, and attitudes in others. This tendency results, for example, in the false consensus effect (see this earlier question), for which there is ample evidence. This general notion of projection is different from the Freudian one in that it is not limited to negative attributes but happens also for positive attributes the self. Various cognitive and motivational mechanisms have been proposed for this more general phenomenon (see Baumeister, et al., 1998, for example, for some pointers).

**References**

Baumeister, R. F., Dale, K., & Sommer, K. L. (1998). Freudian defense mechanisms and empirical findings in modern social psychology: Reaction formation, projection, displacement, undoing, isolation, sublimation, and denial. Journal of Personality, Defense mechanisms in contemporary personality research, 66, 1081–1124. doi:10.1111/1467-6494.00043

Freud, A. (1936/1992). The ego and the mechanisms of defence. London: Karnac Books.

Freud, S. (1915). Instincts and their Vicissitudes. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, 109-140

Newman, L. S., Duff, K. J., & Baumeister, R. F. (1997). A new look at defensive projection: Thought suppression, accessibility, and biased person perception. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72, 980–1001. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.72.5.980
> 1 votes

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Tags: social-psychology, psychoanalysis
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# Question
Title: What are some examples of psychology studies with tiny effect sizes and tiny p-values that are good for teaching?
I'm looking for examples of studies where the result is highly significant but the effect is so tiny that it is meaningless in a practical sense. These will be shared with undergraduate psychology students to illustrate that statistically significant doesn't always mean important or consequential.

# Answer
One example might be the effect of birth order on intelligence. Given a large enough sample there highly significant effects (p\<.00001). However, these effects are very very small.

For a recent example, see Rohrer, Egloff, and Schmukle (2015): the effect of one birth order position was only one tenth of a standard deviation (1.5 IQ points)

> To illustrate this small effect, in our between-family sample of sibships of two, a randomly picked firstborn had a 52% chance of having a higher IQ than a randomly picked secondborn; conversely, a secondborn had a 48% chance of having a higher IQ than a firstborn.

**References**

Rohrer, J. M., Egloff, B., & Schmukle, S. C. (2015). Examining the effects of birth order on personality. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 201506451. http://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1506451112
> 3 votes

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Tags: statistics, teaching-of-psychology
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# Question
Title: Children's progression from counting to addition
How do children progress from counting to addition?

I understand that an grasp of counting is achieved before an understanding of cardinality (size of a set of objects). Thus, there does seem to be some division between procedural understanding and conceptual understanding of counting. However, how does this carry on to addition? Is addition also typically learned procedurally rather than conceptually?

# Answer
The work of Siegler in "The Perils of Averaging Data Over Strategies: An Example from Children's Addition", examines 5 different strategies associated with addition:

* **Retrieval** Where the answer was retrieved from memory
* **Min** Where the smallest addend was used for counting from the starting point of the largest addend
* **Decomposition** Where the complicated problem was reduced into simpler known problems
* **Count All** Where both the addends were counted
* **Guess** Where the answer was guessed

In the table below, which I've copied from the paper, you can see the progression of strategies from grade to grade.

There does seem to be a progression towards retrieval, decomposition and min-count, away from count-all and guessing. However, it is not a completely straight-forward progression.
> 2 votes

# Answer
Yes, addition becomes procedural knowledge. Below is an extract from the book "Smart Thinking by Art Markman", that clearly explains the process :

> When you are learning to do addition, the two procedures you have for adding compete with each other. One of those procedures requires some effort. You start with the bigger number and then count up. Adding two and four means starting with four and then counting to five and six. The other procedure is effortless. You try to remember the answer. If you finish counting before you pull up an answer from memory, then the counting procedure wins. If you are confident you have pulled up the right answer from memory before you finish counting, then the habit wins. After you solve the problem (by either method), you store another memory that 2 + 4 = 6. So, each attempt at an addition problem provides memories that will make it faster for you to remember the correct answer in the future.
>
> The difficulty with math is there are lots of similar facts. You are learning 2 + 4 = 6, but at the same time, you are also encountering problems like 2 + 7 = 9 and 2 + 5 = 7. Sometimes, when you see 2 + 4, you will also recall some of those similar problems. When you retrieve these conflicting answers, you are going to be uncertain about which answer is correct. So you will finish carrying out your counting procedure before you have an answer from memory. Once you have a lot of examples of addition problems in your memory, most of what you pull out of memory when you see 2 + 4 will be other situations in which you also saw 2 + 4. At that point, you retrieve information from memory faster than you can count, and so you have a habit.
>
> Chapter references:
>
> Logan, G. D. (1988). Toward an Instance Theory of Automaticity. Psychological Review 95: 492–527.
>
> Schneider, W., and Shiffrin, R. M. (1977). Controlled and Automatic Human Information Processing: 1. Detection, Search, and Attention. Psychological Review 84 (1): 1–66.
>
> Shiffrin, R. M., and Schneider, W. (1977). Controlled and Automatic Human Information Processing: 2. Perceptual Learning, Automatic Attending, and a General Theory. Psychological Review 84: 127–190.

The two competing systems mentioned above, are actually system 1 and system 2 that are explained in detail by Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking, fast and slow.
> 2 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, reference-request, developmental-psychology
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title: Do the deaf read faster?

text:
# Question
Title: Do the deaf read faster?
Assuming that a person is born deaf and has never heard spoken language, as they learn to read, do they on average read faster than people with healthy hearing who learn to read the usual way?

The reason I'm wondering this is that the first step most speed reading teachers mention is eliminating "sub-vocalization" that is not to imagine the sound of the word as you read since it will limit your reading speed to the speed at which you can comprehend spoken language.

Deaf people presumably never have to deal with this subvocalization issue as they are taught to read in different ways (most likely through associating words to images and/or sign language which in a way is also an image) so I'm wondering if there is a major difference between the reading speed of deaf people and people who are not deaf, or if they are relatively similar, and of course I am wondering how this is without either the deaf or the not deaf having been trained for speedreading beforehand.

# Answer
There doesn't seem to be much research on this, but based on my review of the research it appears that deaf people are generally slower readers than non-deaf readers - but that this may be affected by age. Essentially they may start as slower readers but become faster readers when they are older. See the evidence I found below:

*Conrad, Richard. "The reading ability of deaf school‐leavers." British Journal of Educational Psychology 47.2 (1977): 138-148.*

“4.5% of young deaf people were able to read at the level commensurate with their age”

*Shroyer, Edgar H., and Jack Birch. "Captions and reading rates of hearing-impaired students." American Annals of the Deaf 125.7 (1980): 916-922.*

The mean of the median scores for Hams and Sipay(s (1975) fourth, fifth, and sixth-grade students (intermediate) is 145 words per minute compared with a mean of 142 for the intermediate deaf students. For the hearing students on a junior high school level, the mean of the median reading rates was 188 words per minute and the mean for the deaf students 181 words per minute.

Hearing high school students had a mean of 216 words per minute compared with a mean of 275 words per minute for deaf students

*Kelly L, Barac-Cikoja D. The comprehension of skilled deaf readers: The roles of word recognition and other potentially critical aspects of competence. In: Cain K, Oakhill J, editors. Children’s comprehension problems in oral and written language: A cognitive perspective. Guilford Press; 2007. pp. 244–279.*

The median reading level of young deaf adults graduating from high school is 8 years below the average of their hearing peers

*Bélanger, N. N., Slattery, T. J., Mayberry, R. I., & Rayner, K. (2012). Skilled deaf readers have an enhanced perceptual span in reading. Psychological Science, 23(7), 816-823.*

Reading rate (words per minute) as a function of window size for skilled hearing readers (SKH), skilled deaf readers (SKD) and less skilled deaf readers (LSKD)
> 10 votes

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Tags: reading, language-processing
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# Question
Title: Do introverts engage in too much self-control or do they lack impulsivity?
Regardless of whether people are extraverts or introverts, if they are asked to act in an extraverted way, this improves their mood (for example Zelenski and others 2012). My question is concerns the reasons for why introverts don't engage in extraverted behavior. According to dual process models of behavior (for example Strack, Deutsch, 2014), human behavior is a combination of impulses and more reflective behavior (for example self-control). It strikes me that extraverted behavior is often quite impulsive (e.g. posting a funny picture of oneself on facebook). So, do introverts lack these impulses, or are they too inclined to keep them under control? Is there any research that has tried to disentangle the two processes?

# Answer
> 3 votes
This may not be a perfect answer to your question but it should be of help. Essentially, I think that research on personality suggests that self control (and thus a lack of impulsivity) may be part of the reason why introverts don't engage in extraverted behavior.

According to personality research on arousal \[1\], levels of extroversion and introversion are linked to peoples' arousal levels. Extroverts are argued to be under-aroused (in terms of brain arousal) therefore they seek out new stimuli, while the opposite is the case for introverts. Hence as introverts already over-aroused, they are more likely to avoid new stimuli.

While the research you have cited suggests that introverts would actually benefit from seeking more social interaction, the fact that they do not is not particularly surprising as humans frequently fail to act in ways that benefit themselves.

\[1\]https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Arousal

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Tags: personality, introversion, self-control, extraversion
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# Question
Title: How do we know bipolar is one illness rather than two comorbid illnesses?
Based on my previous question about ADHD and OCD.

Essentially, ADHD and OCD are kind of opposites in the sense that ADHD people (always? sometimes?) have dopamine deficiency and OCD people (always? sometimes?) have excess dopamine.

I know this may be a stupid question or based on incorrect understanding of bipolar, but how do psychologists know that bipolar is one disorder rather than a comorbidity of mania and depression?

# Answer
**Short answer:** Bipolar disorder is probably not composed of two comorbid illnesses, but it may be on a continuum that includes some depressive disorders.

This is a good question, though it does convey some confusion associated with this diagnosis that should be cleared up.

**Bipolar symptoms:**

The first confusion I think is the idea that "depression", "mania", and "bipolar" are disorders. Depression and mania are not disorders - they are symptoms. And bipolar is a "spectrum" disorder - a collection or continuum of similar diagnoses, that all feature at least one manic or hypomanic episode, and in most cases at least one depressive episode.

It is true that depression without mania is one of the key symptoms of a variety of depressive mood disorders (such as major depressive disorder, sometimes referred to as "unipolar" because of the lack of manic episodes), so it may be confused with a disorder. However, this is not the case for mania, so diagnostically bipolar disorder would not be confused with a comorbidity of 2 disorders - depression and mania - because mania is not a disorder.

Mania rarely presents without other symptoms:

> Although bipolar disorder is by far the most common cause of mania, it is a key component of other psychiatric conditions (e.g., schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type; cyclothymia) and may occur secondary to neurologic or general medical conditions, or as a result of substance abuse.

Presumably, a standalone manic episode may be sufficient for a diagnosis of bipolar I disorder or a "not otherwise specified" (NOS) diagnosis, depending on the severity and other symptoms involved. So diagnostically, "mania" as a standalone disorder is actually a sub-type of bipolar.

**Bipolar unitarity:**

The second confusion I think is the idea that a bipolar diagnosis in some way precludes the symptoms of depression and mania from having separate causes.

Historically, bipolar disorder was not seen as 2 separate illnesses because (1) it was believed that mania and depression were mutually exclusive in time - as 2 extremes (poles) of a single mood continuum, and (2) mania rarely presents without depression. The assumption of mutual exclusivity of mania and depression was called into question by the occurrence of mixed-state episodes - a condition that features symptoms of both mania and depression simultaneously.

Ultimately, many psychiatric diagnostic criteria are encumbered by some historical precedence, common clinical presentations, how patients perceive their symptoms, and also some political influence, as diagnoses are associated with healthcare subsidization, stigma and prejudice, and explanatory power for the patient. So diagnostic criteria should not generally be confused with an understanding of common cause.

The cause of bipolar spectrum disorders is not well understood, and the question of whether unipolar and bipolar disorders are distinct, or part of a single continuum, remains a hotly debated topic. The very common co-occurrence of depressive episodes whenever manic episodes are present suggests that they may be related in some way. On the other hand, depression disorders and bipolar disorders are treated with different medications, suggesting that they may be distinct disorders - depression is typically treated with anti-depressants, while bipolar depression may be more effectively treated with mood stabilizers. The disorders have some predictors (genetic, environmental, comorbidities) in common, and some different. It's also entirely possible that both disorders incorrectly encompass several unrelated sub-types.
> 9 votes

# Answer
The term "bipolar" is used to describe someone who has both manic and depressive episodes - so it is really a name for the combination of the two conditions.

Before bipolar became the popular name for this, it was described as mixed affective state and was characterised as being dysphoric mania or agitated depression depending on whether it was mostly manic or mostly depressive.

I believe it is widely-accepted now that mania and depression are not the opposite ends of a long scale, but are independent measures.

# One Illness or Two Comorbid Illnesses?

In short, I don't believe you can answer this in general - I believe it should be considered on a case by case basis.

If you want closure / a "correct" answer, the APA (V) lists bipolar as an Axis I disorder, which suggests their view is a single illness, rather than comorbidity, using the psychological definition of comorbidity. In psychology, comorbidity would be more than one diagnosis. If you can diagnose someone as "bipolar" there would be no comorbidity.

It isn't possible to apply the medical definition of comorbidity in psychology (as of 2015) because you can't detect individual diseases in a lab at this time, so bear in mind that the use of the term is highly interpretive in terms of psychology.

I would question whether for an individual it is more beneficial to treat the two aspects of their condition separately or as a whole. For example, you may decide to only treat the depression and not attempt to suppress the elevated moods - so are you treating the individual for bipolar here, or just for depression?
> 0 votes

# Answer
I am bipolar and I see my mental difference as one unit.

One thing to remember is that the term "bipolar" is just a label for people that exhibit the mood symptoms that are observable. As most bipolar people know, there are a lot of other symptoms such as fatigue/excess energy, dizziness, confusion, short term memory issues, pain, numbness, migraines... And the fact that a lot of us experience these same symptoms leads me to believe that they are all related to a singular cause in some way.

If you think about people with MS, they all experience similar symptoms that many docs attribute to lesions in the brain and such. Since these can often be seen with an MRI, docs have now named the disease based on the cause not the symptoms.

Unfortunately, we can't see the chemicals moving around the brain or the synapses at work. So until we can, we only label the condition based on the two symptoms that cause the most disruption.

As such, these mental differences have been treated for a long time using the spaghetti-to-wall technique. Throw meds at the patient to see which ones stick. And that's how it had to be since it wasn't until recently that they've been able to use better MRI imaging techniques and such to see more of the structure of the brain.

This was how most "research" was done in the field. "We think this drug targets dopamine, so therefore if a patient responds to this drug then they must have a dopamine problem which means that bipolar in general must involve dopamine." Not the most accurate way to do research, but it was the only way possible for a very long time.

So with all this said, I believe that the symptoms originate from a singular cause. However, we are talking about the brain which is the most complex organ known to man so anything is possible.

### **Sources:**

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/bipolar-disorder-in-adults/index.shtml

In addition, people with bipolar disorder are at higher risk for thyroid disease, migraine headaches, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and other physical illnesses.12,13 These illnesses may cause symptoms of mania or depression, or they may be caused by some medications used to treat bipolar disorder.

http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2011/08/04/doctor-is-my-mood-disorder-due-to-a-chemical-imbalance/

The most we can say is that, in general, certain psychiatric illnesses probably involve abnormalities in specific brain chemicals; and that by using medications that affect these chemicals, we often find that patients are significantly improved.
> 0 votes

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Tags: abnormal-psychology, depression, adhd, mood, bipolar-disorder
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# Question
Title: If we do not consciously perceive a sound at a time, can we sometimes still later consciously recall it?
You all probably know the thought experiment, 'If a tree falls in the forest and no one is their to hear it, does it make a sound?'. But if we take that one step further and ask 'If we are not consciously aware of a sound do we hear it?'. This question as it stands is very broad so let me specify what I mean.

By consciously aware I mean that we are actively thinking about that sound when it occurs and by hear I mean at some later time, (perhaps with prompting) are you able to recall that there was a sound?

(Of course the question can be phrased not just concerning hearing but also things like pain, etc).

# Answer
> 2 votes
This question is related to subliminal perception, often studied in vision but sometimes also in hearing. This remains a bit controversial, and that is mostly because of arguments about how ones measures whether something has been perceived or not.

My answer to your main question would be "no", but that is speculation. You use the word "recall", which in memory research generally suggests an explicit, conscious recollection and you would normally only get this if you had consciously perceived something and encoded it the first time round. There are, however, examples of subliminal sounds which are not identified at the first presentation but which nevertheless affect later behaviour (e.g., here).

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Tags: philosophy-of-mind
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# Question
Title: How does masturbation influence your brain and dreams?
What exactly changes in your brain the moment after you've finished masturbating? Could there be any effect neuro-psychologically on dreams or lucid dreaming?

# Answer
**Short answer:** We don't really know yet.

**Long answer:**

This excellent question exposes an enormous gap in humanity's knowledge about the postpubescent psyche. I dare say that not only post-masturbatory dreaming in general but also post-masturbatory lucid dreaming in particular have been gravely neglected by the interdisciplinary research community for decades.

Even though early psychoanalytic approaches have already made great advances in pushing the boundaries of our knowledge at the nexus of autoerotic behavior patterns, dream content, and dream lucidity (see, e.g., the seminal work of Ellis, 1910; Bernstein, 1962; Meltzer, 1966) via meticulous arm-chair reasoning, self-observation, and clinical case studies, these theoretical advances have not been subjected to sufficient quantitative let alone neuroscientific scrutiny yet.

A comprehensive search for "dreams" & "masturbation" in the PsychInfo database yields a meager number of 8 hits indicating that the topic is under-researched.

One of the most relevant and influential (2 citations according to Google Scholar) empirical paper seems to be by Yu (2012) who asked 52 young male Chinese adults to complete a questionnaire on masturbation, pornography, and dream content. The key results of the study highlight the extent to which masturbatory research has progressed over the years. However, they also open up interesting avenues for future scientific endeavors. Yu's (2012) findings suggest the startling conclusion that

> ...the more often men watch pornography, the more frequently they masturbate to ejaculation...

and, even more relevant for the present purposes...

> ... the less likely they are to experience nocturnal emissions \[wet dreams\].

Even though this trailblazing research included a wide variety of additional pornographic and dreaming-related variables (whose meaning should not be googled at the workplace), it remains silent on the question of how masturbatory processes affect quantity and quality of dream lucidity.

Making matters more complicated, a similar research project, in which 70 German students were surveyed about sexual activity and dream content (Schredl, Desch, Röming, & Spachmann, 2009) came to different conclusions:

> The findings indicate that the frequency of erotic dreams is related to the amount of time spent with sexual fantasies in waking life but not to intercourse or masturbation.

I can only speculate that cultural differences may be involved deserving further empirical attention.

Furthermore, because this research is limited by the fact that it is only based on retrospective, self-report measures, it seems fruitful and of utmost importance to investigate these questions employing a modern neuroscience approach.

**References**

Bernstein, I. (1962). Dreams and masturbation in an adolescent boy. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 10(2), 289-302.

Ellis, H. (1910). Autoerotism: A Study of the Spontaneous Manifestations of the Sexual Impuse. In Studies in the psychology of sex Vol 1: The evolution of modesty, the phenomena of sexual periodicity, auto-erotism (3rd ed. rev. and enlarged) (pp. 161–325). Philadelphia, PA, US: F A Davis.

Meltzer, D. (1966) ‘The relation of anal masturbation to projective identification’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 47: 335-342.

Schredl, M., Desch, S., Röming, F., & Spachmann, A. (2009). Erotic dreams and their relationship to waking-life sexuality. Sexologies, 18(1), 38–43. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.sexol.2008.05.001

Yu, C. K. C. (2012). Pornography consumption and sexual behaviors as correlates of erotic dreams and nocturnal emissions. Dreaming, 22(4), 230.
> 5 votes

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Tags: dreams, sexuality
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title: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy 101

text:
# Question
Title: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy 101
Let's say that I'm completely green about psychology and CBT (like I really know nothing, apart from that CBT exists). Is there a good introduction/ seminal work, but with relatively low barrier of entry and not too massive (something that could be learned/ studied in several evenings)?

I'm aware of this question, but what I'm looking for specifically is a book or a more involved/ in-depth resource.

# Answer
I think that you should look at one of the more well rated books on CBT.

Aaron beck is the father of CBT so maybe start with his book if you can't make a decision.
> 1 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology
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# Question
Title: Can one depressive episode be enough to prescribe antidepressants?
Suppose someone were to see a psychiatrist, explain their life problems and such and then their psychiatrist concludes they are currently in a depressive episode. Their psychiatrist doesn't yet know if they have major depressive disorder - MDD - bipolar disorder or no disorder.

**Are there situations where someone in such scenario might be able to be prescribed antidepressants or any kind of medication?** I can tell such situations are rare since doctors would probably want more information before prescribing medication.

The context of this question is what we can conclude from those who are prescribed antidepressants. *Does the fact that they have been prescribed such medications imply that they have been diagnosed with or highly thought by a doctor to have a mental illness instead of simply having an "episode" or a temporary mental health problem?*

Sorry if the assumptions of my questions are wrong. I'm assuming that there are cases where mental health problems are temporary much like having a fever and some are permanent much like being farsighted. To my knowledge, people can experience a depressive episode without having MDD or bipolar

# Answer
> Suppose someone were to see a psychiatrist, explain their life problems and such and then their psychiatrist concludes they are currently in a depressive episode. Their psychiatrist doesn't yet know if they have major depressive disorder - MDD - bipolar disorder or no disorder.
>
> Are there situations where someone in such scenario might be able to be prescribed antidepressants or any kind of medication?

Yes, absolutely. I do not think that they are necessarily rare either. As this link attests:

The proportion of non-psychiatrist doctor visits where antidepressants were prescribed without a documented psychiatric diagnosis increased from 59.5% to 72.7% between 1996 and 2007, according to a new study in Health Affairs.

> Does the fact that they have been prescribed such medications imply that they have been diagnosed with or highly thought by a doctor to have a mental illness instead of simply having an "episode" or a temporary mental health problem?

Being prescribed the medicine implies that the doctor believed that they were suffering from depression, a form of mental illness. Other factors (e.g., the symptoms or their history) would dictate whether the doctor though it was/would be a long term mental illness/mental health problem.
> 2 votes

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Tags: abnormal-psychology, psychiatry, depression, health-psychology, medication
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# Question
Title: What's the difference between stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination?
I'm especially interested in the difference between the first two. Some people have said prejudice is when a stereotype about a group is applied to an individual, but a lot of places (even within psychology) talk about prejudice as though it can also apply to a group. Allport described prejudice as an "antipathy" towards another group, but that doesn't seem to describe implicit prejudice. How exactly are these terms defined?

# Answer
The terms are sometimes used a little differently. Nevertheless, in psychological research, there is quite some consensus about their use. For example, reflecting the most prevalent view, the Resolution on Prejudice, Stereotypes, and, Discrimination of the American Psychological Association (2006), defines them in the following way:

> **prejudices** are unfavorable affective reactions to or evaluations of groups and their members, **stereotypes** are generalized beliefs about groups and their members, interpersonal **discrimination** is differential treatment by individuals toward some groups and their members relative to other groups and their members, and institutional discrimination involves policies and contexts that create, enact, reify, and maintain inequality (Dovidio, Brigham, Johnson, & Gaertner, 1996; Eagly & Diekman, 2005; Fiske, 1998; Lott & Maluso, 1995; Mio, Barker-Hackett, & Tumambing, 2006; Myers, 2005; Nelson, 2005; Shih, Pittinsky, & Ambady,1999)

In other words, if Person A does not like (has a negative emotional reaction toward) the Lokai in general, or Person B (whether explicitly or implicitly) in particular because this person is a Lokai, that's **prejudice**.

If Person A believes that being a Lokai makes Person B a treacherous, lazy, and dumb guy, but a great cook and guitar player (you have to grant them that!) that's a **stereotype**.

If Person A doesn't invite Person B to his/her party because he/she is a Lokai, that's **discrimination**.
> 8 votes

# Answer
> How exactly are these terms defined?

Not exactly. Many terms are not used consistently in science therefore different scholars will use them in different ways. Furthermore, as there is little merit in doing so, few scholars will generally attempt to differentiate complex and contested terms. With this considered there will probably not be a clear objective way to differentiate stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination - you may need to make an argument based on assembling relevant discussions of each individual concept.

This is how I understand it. A stereotype is rule of thumb about how to think about/act toward a specific type of entity. You can have a stereotype about anything - not just about people. Prejudice is generally considered to be a (negative) prejudgment of something/someone. In some sense a prejudice is therefore just a negative stereotype about a person (or group of people). Discrimination is generally considered to involve treating someone less well (in terms of behaviour rather than just attitude) due to some characteristic(s) of theirs. Discrimination is therefore essentially a behavioural manifestion of prejudice.

To give an example, a bouncer associates people of one race with being violent (a stereotype). He is therefore more likely to prevent people of that race from entry to his night club (prejudice). He prevents two member of that race from entry on a specific night (discrimination).

That isn't a perfect example but I hope it makes things a little clearer. Let me know if you want more details or clarification.
> 1 votes

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Tags: social-psychology
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# Question
Title: What is the psychology behind male pornographic actors having larger than average penises?
There is a question What does scientific research say about the relationship between penis size and attractiveness?

This answer and this link give the statistics of penis size. Given these statistics, the average man performing in porn, would likely be in the top 2.5% of the population of penis size.

> Porn stars are statistical outliers, not the norm; men are more likely to be over 6’3” than to have a penis longer than 7.5 inches.

It also "appears" that men may be inclined to having poor self-perception, regarding their penis size.

> Males self-perception
> Males may quite easily underestimate the size of their own penis relative to that of others, because of the foreshortening obtained from looking down, due to repeated observation of atypical penises in pornography, or because of the accumulation of fat at the base of the penis.\[34\] A survey by sexologists showed that many men who believed that their penis was of inadequate size had average-sized penises.\[35\]

Given that men are the main consumers of pornography, why does pornography feature so many men, out of the norm for penis size?
Would it be more appealing to men, if the men starring in porn, had average sized penis? what is the psychology behind using men with such, abnormally, large penis?

# Answer
Besides the simple mechanics of it being easier to position actors and film the details of intercourse there is probably a supernormal stimulus effect. The term, coined by Tinbergen (1948) when he observed birds laying artificial eggs of ridiculous size, is used to describe the effect of a stimulus which elicits a response more strongly than the stimulus for which it evolved. Very large breasts, buttocks, penises, tall heights, etc. are not necessarily particularly useful but because we evolved to prefer larger values of these for fitness reasons we suffer from a supernormal stimulus effect when they are exaggerated. Imagine the rarity of such things for millenia of our evolution during which food and leisure time were relatively scarce. There was little reason to evolve a preference against extreme proportions.
> 15 votes

# Answer
a) Since pornography is about visuals, not actual physical stimulation, visual properties of the body part are more important: big breasts and big penises are more attractive in pornography than they are in real life, because larger penises and breasts "stand out more" and are more impressive to the viewers, even though the same men (or women) might not find such features important (or even attractive) in real life.

b) Pornography is not about making anyone happy, it is a product that must leave its consumers unsatisfied. More pornography can be sold, if men are unhappy in real life and use pornography instead of working on their relationships. Making men and women unhappy with themselves and each other will make relationships less likely to function and men and women to use consumption as a substitute.

c) In pornography for a male public it does not matter what women find attractive, because they are not the main consumers of that medium. The male organs visible in for-men-pornography must be attractive for men and therefore conform to their ideas about male attractiveness.
> 7 votes

# Answer
**Could it be that men are more strongly aroused by porn actors with large penises?**

This would be implied by **sperm competition theory**. The basic idea is that if females have more than one mating partner, there is an evolutionary pressure on men. According to the theory, over time, this results in adaptations in response to this "sperm competition" that increase the chance that own sperm is successful.

If this is the case, then **seeing sexually aroused rivals should be a strong stimulus indicating sperm competition**. This idea has been investigated in various studies that have looked at the kind of pornography that men consume, and the consequences of doing so.

For example, Pound (2002) found that in pornography, depictions of sexual activity of several men with one woman are more frequent than depictions with several females and one male, and that men select the first category of pornography more frequently.

As another example, Kilgallon and Simmons (2005) showed men pornographic images of either two males and a female (sperm competition images) or pictures of three females (without males). Their results indicated that the semen quality (sperm motility) was better when the men saw pornography involving other men.

I couldn't find any research that has look at penis size directly. Nevertheless it is a straightforward conjecture that, as aroused penises are a sperm competition stimulus, larger penises should evoke more arousal.

**References**

Pound, N. (2002). Male interest in visual cues of sperm competition risk. Evolution and Human Behavior, 23(6), 443–466. http://doi.org/10.1016/S1090-5138(02)00103-4

Kilgallon, S. J., & Simmons, L. W. (2005). Image content influences men’s semen quality. Biology Letters, 1, 253-255.
> 2 votes

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Tags: social-psychology, sexuality, physical-attraction
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# Question
Title: Implementation Intentions and Mental Contrasting vs Meditation
Everyday I see so many studies on meditation. These include all types (mindfulness, TM, etc..). The studies only report positive results. Meditation has been purported to increase self-control and willpower. But it seems that implementation intentions combined with mental contrasting would be better. Implementation intentions take the following form: "If I encounter situation X then I will do this." Mental contrasting sets the future goal with the current obstacles and creates an "energization." So it seems that this intervention (MCII) would be better than meditation by itself.

The reason I ask is I have been meditating for a month and have not noticed changes in my self-control. It seems that the so-called benefits of meditation could all be part of a placebo effect.

# Answer
I cannot fit this into a comment, so I would post this answer, hoping it may be useful to someone.

The affirmation of the form

> "If I encounter situation X then I will do this."

Has been tried by amateurs in the field of lucid dream induction. Lucid dreaming is about realizing that one is dreaming from within a dream. Normally people have very limited self control during dreams, and the affirmation statement attempts to increase it. Such statement usually includes a "dreamsign", followed by an intention to realize the fact that the person is dreaming:

> "If I will find myself in math class, I will realize that I'm dreaming, because I have graduated from high school and college, and don't have to take any more math classes for the rest of my life".

Normally, rational thought is very hazy in a dream. For example, a typical scenario is a person may find himself in a math(chemistry/other hard subject) class dream, taking an exam that the person is not prepared for. The rational mind does not question this.

The interesting thing happens (at least to me) when the above mentioned affirmation does get triggered - still without clear rational thought I get up from the desk and walk out of the class. There's no clear awareness of why, but the behavior is changed when the stimuli is experienced.
> 2 votes

# Answer
Did you have a problem with self-control then that you felt needed improvement? "Self-control" is really rather vague- what were you looking for that would have said to you that your self control had "improved"?

Perhaps your self-control is already pretty good. For those who LACK self-control many times their inability is due to their not knowing what having self-control feels like, if you will. It is far easier to return to a state which one has memory of the experience of than it is to get to it for the first time. Meditation has us do that which causes us to be in the mental state we are in when we are practicing self-control. It is like exercise and practiced over time it mainly allows one to "drop into" that mindstate more easily and quickly until one can just remain there.
> 1 votes

# Answer
The trick is that the word "meditation" can be used for many various things. For example, are you sure you understand *what* is a meditation? Are you sure you're meditating?

Or put it another way, why do you think that "implementation intentions combined with mental contrasting" is not a meditation?

Also, please notice that in the traditions from where we have the notion of meditation, people can spend years before they really get it. I mean, not how to meditate, but what meditation is about.

Effectively, considering your question: either "implementation intentions combined with mental contrasting" is a meditation technique too, or meditation is not about techniques at all. Depends on how you use the word.
> 0 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, meditation
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# Question
Title: Difference vs. Ratio of evidence in sequential sampling models
In sequential sampling models - for instance Ratcliff and Smith, (2006) \- participants' responses in a binary choice experiment are modelled by a particle, which moves up or down towards the boundaries for selecting each response over time according to the evidence in favour of each, or, analogously, their expected utility (Busemeyer & Townsend, 1993), in a way that looks something like this:

My question is if anyone knows, and preferably can provide a reference for, whether in such a model responses are best predicted by

* the difference in the evidence for/expected utility of each response (i.e. $P(Response\ A) = Evidence\ for\ A - Evidence\ for\ B$) or
* the ratio of evidence/expected utility (i.e. $P(Response\ A) = \frac{Evidence\ for\ A}{Evidence\ for\ B}$)

My intuition is that it's the ratio between the two responses, rather than the absolute difference, which should best predict responses, but I can't find a reference for this, and I'm sure this question has been answered somewhere before.

Has anyone any ideas here?

# Answer
Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean, ratio of evidence is actually a terrible method because that would end up with an immediate decision as soon as any evidence is encountered for either side, giving a ratio of infinity for that side (something/0 is greater than any finite decision threshold).

Try Gold and Shadlen 2007 for a review http://synapse.princeton.edu/~sam/gold\_shadlen07\_annu\_rev\_neurosci.pdf
> 1 votes

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Tags: reference-request, cognitive-modeling, decision-making
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# Question
Title: Progressed smoothly in a game while not paying attention
I was playing Flappy Bird trying to beat my highest score. While on one run (or fly, hehe) my friend got me engaged in a conversation. When the short conversation ended I found myself thinking about something for probably 10-15 seconds, where in this time my eyes were looking at the game on my iPad, and yet my actual attention was not on the game. I was deep in thought on the topic my friend had brought up. The moment I got back to reality, I tried to re-engage myself with the game, but within a few seconds I crashed the poor bird. I had broken my record, however. It was as if another side of me took over while i was busy thinking of something else on the side. I voluntarily tried to reproduce this situation but I failed at the multitasking (as I know some will call it). This has happened while doing other things too. How is this explained, and why can it not be reproduced voluntarily.

# Answer
> 3 votes
My interpretation of this question is that you are asking about divided attention. Some (normally easy) tasks can continue to be accomplished in conditions of divided attention, and with practice you should be able to control this.

I don't know of any research confirming your suggestion that you actually got better in such conditions. You could also look at recent studies on mind-wandering (which tend to show interruptions in the main task when you are thinking about something else) or the passive/active mode in visual tasks (in which, some argue, people actually get better when they don't concentrate as hard).

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Tags: psychology, multi-tasking
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# Question
Title: Does human to human interface carry the same information from the brain
I'd like to know if the human to human interface carry the same information from the brain or it is just a signal that switch on or off electrical impulses that causes the limb to contract?

Is it even possible to take someone else signal coming from the brain and redirect to somebody else where the other person can use it for the same result or is it always going to be digital type On or OFF and not analog?

# Answer
> 1 votes
The answer for the particular interface that you linked to is that a single scalar variable is being passed. The EMG activity in one person controls an electrical signal that is connected to a nerve in the second person, which when activated causes the muscle to contract. The EMG activity is thresholded and then the binary information of whether or not it passes that threshold is passed to a "TENS unit" whose output can be controlled in an analog way.

While the actual information being passed in this demonstration is binary, there is no reason why it must be so. It is simply a result of the design decisions the creators made.

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Tags: neural-network
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title: Moral neuroscience

text:
# Question
Title: Moral neuroscience
There are many studies done on how the brains of psychopaths and criminals are different from the brains of normal people. e.g. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2273857/Neurologist-discovers-dark-patch-inside-brains-killers-rapists.html and http://bigthink.com/going-mental/the-neurobiology-of-evil

Has there been a study done on the brains of "good" people? For example all the Mother Theresa's in the world.

The reason I'm wondering this, is that if we can figure out what makes people "good" then we can make "good" GM babies in the future.

# Answer
To some extent, I agree with you that there is probably more done on the extreme negative end of morality, partly because that (debatably) is seen as more abnormal and society is more interested in fixing it. There has been considerable work on psychopathy and sociopathy, which means that cognitive neuroscience is more willing to treat such people as special cases. I suspect people would be much more reluctant to label people as "good". There is, however, work on how things like generosity (which presumably Mother Theresa and co are very high on) reflect/influence brain activity.
> 2 votes

# Answer
There was a recent paper in *PNAS* (Marsh et al., 2014) that examined "extraordinary altruists" who volunteered to donate a kidney to a stranger.

As opposed to psychopaths, who tend to show diminished sensitivity to threatening faces, altruists (vs. healthy controls) showed heightened sensitivity to these faces, which was associated with greater activity and volume in the right amygdala. By contrast, amygdala volume and activity tends to be reduced in psychopathy. So, in a crude way, altruism and psychopathy represent different ends of a spectrum.
> 2 votes

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Tags: moral-psychology
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# Question
Title: Are there any programmes to identify modular "NeuroBricks"?
In synthetic biology, an organization called the BioBricks Foundation tries to identify modular biological components that are amenable to engineering design, and publishes them in the Registry of Standard Biological Parts. Does an analogous movement/organization/research group exist in the neuroscience community working on finding general "NeuroBricks"? These could come in the form of either individual neurons with well-defined abstracted functions or neural networks that do predictable things (i.e. adders, logic gates, amplifiers, etc.)

I ask because I know that the field of neuroengineering is a thing, but I have no idea how possible it is to do direct engineering of neural networks or neurons (it seems like the current consensus is somewhere in the range of really really hard to impossible).

# Answer
Assuming that by "neurobricks" you imply the ability to design systems using modular neuronal components, then I think the Neurological Engineering Framework (NEF) and Nengo, the software used to leverage the NEF, is what you're looking for.

Essentially, groups of neurons fire together as a way to encode information from various sources. So you can get simple things like an integrator or something that keeps track of where to move a joystick (like in the research by Georgopolous), but that can scale up (because it's just a group of neurons) all the way to a complex model of the brain like Spaun.

In terms of engineering applications, there's a lot of things that these neurons are particularly good at, such as robotic arms, as shown in Spaun.
> 3 votes

# Answer
Do you mean https://github.com/hantek/NeuroBricks ? This is a python framework you may need if you are dealing with a deep learning related source code.
> 1 votes

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Tags: neuroscience, cognitive-neuroscience, neural-network
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# Question
Title: link between top-down (bottom-up) processing and cortex layers
What are the relations between top-down and bottom-up processings and the flows of information in the brain? For example, does top-down processing start from some layers and go to lower layers? If so does the information remain in the same area of the brain or can it travel from a layer of one area down to lower layers of an others areas? Also how are feedforward (feedback) pathways related to bottom-up (top-down)?

# Answer
> 2 votes
It is generally thought that thalamic input comes in layer 4, feed back from higher areas come through layer 1 to layer 2/3 and feed forward is sent from the deeper layers.

see Canonical Microcircuits for Predictive Coding
Andre Bastos, W. Martin Usrey, Rick Adams, George Mangun, Pascal Fries, and Karl Friston
http://psych.nyu.edu/clash/poeppellab/JournalClubPapers/BastosFristonNeuron12.pdf

who cite Douglas, R.J., and Martin, K.A. (1991). A functional microcircuit for cat visual cortex. J. Physiol. 440, 735–769.

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Tags: neuroscience, cognitive-modeling, theoretical-neuroscience, computational-modeling, neural-network
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title: How is information stored in the brain

text:
# Question
Title: How is information stored in the brain
I believe information in computer is physically stored as a lattice of "boxes". Each box is either magnetized or de-magnetized. The computer reads this to retrieve and consolidate useful information.

My question is at the cellular level, how is information stored. I have tried looking the topic up and read about the strengthening of synapses. However, what is the low level mechanism for storing information? There has to be some "state" of the cell that can be processed.

By the way, so what is the physical mechanism behind each type of memory.

# Answer
One hypothesis about the molecular basis of memory is CaMKII
Nature Reviews Neuroscience 13, 169-182 (March 2012) | doi:10.1038/nrn3192
Mechanisms of CaMKII action in long-term potentiation
http://www.silvalab.com/LMcourse/Lisman2012.pdf
> 1 votes

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Tags: memory, long-term-memory, working-memory, semantic-memory, procedural-memory
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# Question
Title: How long does the trace of a memory last in the brain?
With long-term plasticity one refers to the phenomen by which synapses are modified by neural activity and these modifications last for long times, a day perhaps of the order of days. This phenomenon is often described in contrast to short-term plasticity, where the response of a synapse has a non-linear component that depend on the history of the presynaptic activity in a short time in the past of the order of hundreds of ms.

Plasticity is in fact a much more complicated subject and involves processes at different levels, at the synapse, neuron, network and whole brain (e.g., homeostasis) level. Given our current knowledge of memory systems in the brain, how long are we able to trace even small bits of the memory of a stimulus we were exposed in the past?

Obviously one can answer the question at the cognitive level, i.e., we can rephrase the question and ask instead: What's the oldest memory I can recall? It is well known that our behavior as adults is a reflection of even the oldest memories of our lives. However, I would argue that this is an inderect effect, namely those events that happened in our childhood had an influence on how and what we experience say in the adolescence, and then what we experience as adults is a reflection of what we experienced in adolescence. One known phenomenon that seems to "elongate" memories in the future is the one of replay, i.e., the fact that our brain spontaneously recalls memories of the past like in dreaming.

In computational neuroscience, we can trace bits of patterns stored in a neural network with plastic synapses by probing the network, e.g., by presenting a noisy version of a training pattern and testing if the network is able to recall that pattern, something like an associative memory paradigm. A statistical tool used to test the scaling properties of synapse models is the signal-to-noise ratio analysis. Using this analysis, one is able to address the question of a memory lifetime by assessing whether the synapses maintained some information of a pattern in the past (the signal) with statistical arguments (i.e., with respect to the "noise" of all the other memories interfering with the old one).

Is anybody aware of any experiment where people tried to trace single bits of memories at a single synapse level? In models, the weight of single synapses is maintained for ever unless other memories interfere with that. In reality, it would be interesting to see whether single biological synapses can maintain information on long time-scales (days? months? years?), even considering protein turn-over, or if its the network dynamics that plays a crucial role in maintaining those memories or refreshing them.

Note that answers that go beyond the synapse level are also welcome, that's why the main title doesn't specify to much details.

# Answer
This is a very difficult question that we don't know the answer to yet. Here are some references.

Impermanence of dendritic spines in live adult CA1 hippocampus
Alessio Attardo, James E. Fitzgerald & Mark J. Schnitzer
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v523/n7562/full/nature14467.html

> Strikingly, CA1 spine turnover dynamics differed sharply from those seen previously in the neocortex7, 8, 9. Mathematical modelling revealed that the data best matched kinetic models with a single population of spines with a mean lifetime of approximately 1–2 weeks. This implies ~100% turnover in ~2–3 times this interval, a near full erasure of the synaptic connectivity pattern.

Long-Term In Vivo Imaging of Dendritic Spines in the Hippocampus Reveals Structural Plasticity
Ligang Gu, Stefanie Kleiber, Lena Schmid, Felix Nebeling, Miriam Chamoun, Julia Steffen, Jens Wagner, and Martin Fuhrmann
http://www.jneurosci.org/content/34/42/13948.short

Transient and Persistent Dendritic Spines in the Neocortex In Vivo Anthony J.G.D. Holtmaat, Joshua T. Trachtenberg3, Linda Wilbrecht, Gordon M. Shepherd, Xiaoqun Zhang, Graham W. Knott, Karel Svoboda
http://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273(05)00004-8

> Dendritic spines were imaged over days to months in the apical tufts of neocortical pyramidal neurons (layers 5 and 2/3) in vivo. A fraction of thin spines appeared and disappeared over a few days, while most thick spines persisted for months. In the somatosensory cortex, from postnatal day (PND) 16 to PND 25 spine retractions exceeded additions, resulting in a net loss of spines. The fraction of persistent spines (lifetime ≥ 8 days) grew gradually during development and into adulthood (PND 16–25, 35%; PND 35–80, 54%; PND 80–120, 66%; PND 175–225, 73%), providing evidence that synaptic circuits continue to stabilize even in the adult brain, long after the closure of known critical periods. In 6-month-old mice, spines turn over more slowly in visual compared to somatosensory cortex, possibly reflecting differences in the capacity for experience-dependent plasticity in these brain regions.

Stably maintained dendritic spines are associated with lifelong memories
Guang Yang1, Feng Pan1 & Wen-Biao Gan1
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7275/full/nature08577.html

> Importantly, a small fraction of new spines induced by novel experience, together with most spines formed early during development and surviving experience-dependent elimination, are preserved and provide a structural basis for memory retention throughout the entire life of an animal.
> 1 votes

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Tags: learning, theoretical-neuroscience, long-term-memory
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# Question
Title: What happens to brain during meditation?
Meditation has many benefits.For example it helps to relax, reduce stress, etc. But how it is working? What exactly happens to our brains during meditation?

# Answer
I'm not sure about what happens in the brain while someone is actually meditating (i.e., the state effect of meditation), but a meta-analysis from last year (Fox et al., 2014) looked carefully at what long term brain changes result from meditation. This is from the abstract:

> Anatomical likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis found eight brain regions consistently altered in meditators, including areas key to meta-awareness (frontopolar cortex/BA 10), exteroceptive and interoceptive body awareness (sensory cortices and insula), memory consolidation and reconsolidation (hippocampus), self and emotion regulation (anterior and mid cingulate; orbitofrontal cortex), and intra- and interhemispheric communication (superior longitudinal fasciculus; corpus callosum).

The paper is available online here: http://www.christofflab.ca/pdfs/Fox2014-MeditationMorphometry.pdf
> 3 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, attention, brain-development, meditation
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# Question
Title: A list of books on the big ideas of psychology
Can anyone give a list of all the books one should read in order to have a fairly general understanding of psychology, and with somewhat of an emphasis cognitive and evolutionary psychology. I realize that the discipline diversifies and it is a difficult thing to do, but perhaps it can something like the books a typical psychology major would have to read in undergrad? And I welcome reading the technical works so please feel to mention them.

\*What I am interested in is the difference between the attempts of existential philosophy and psychology and their results of human understanding, and how the two compliment and relate to each other. If anyone has any recommendations on this question specifically, other than the works of Maslow, that will really help. Thanks in advance.

# Answer
Yeah, it's too difficult to say ALL the books, because there are thousands. Some good ones I've come across lately are "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Kahneman. His ideas have been enormously influential, especially since he won the Nobel Prize, and it's easy to read.

Another book I've been reading lately is "The Evolution of Childhood" by Melvin Konner. It's not really psychology, more behavioral biology and evolution, but it's relevant to psychology and interesting.

I'll come back and post more as I think of them.
> 2 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, social-psychology, reference-request, philosophy-of-mind
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# Question
Title: Link between certain aspects of basic behavioural traits
Is there a correlation in certain aspects of human traits,whether it is gene related.

People from dominating countries during the early 1800s invading into other nations.

For e.g:Portuguese,British people have a higher degree of self respect and sense of command as compared to the invaded country population.These 'invaded country, people collectively develop a sense of inferiority.And it is passed through the years.

Thus is it likely for people in the present age to show similar traits due to genes?

# Answer
Not really. It's possible that behavioural traits are genetic to some extent, but it's impossible to separate that from the environmental influences enough to link to specific events such as invading other countries. Also, usually invaders stayed to colonize the country they invaded so that there was a mixing of the genes of invaded and invaders. So even if there were links between genetics and likelihood to invade, you couldn't make the connection now between historical events and the behavioural traits of the current generation.
> 1 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, social-psychology, psychology
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# Question
Title: Able to type promptly, but doubt validity when spelling it out?
I was unable to frame a search query for my question, hence decided to post it out here.

I am normally able to type passwords, numbers and other tiny bits of text very fast. However if I have to spell/say this to some other person, let's say a Customer Service Rep, my mind doubts whether the information is correct or incorrect.

I hope you can follow my question, could anyone explain any scientific term that defines this condition of mind, where recalling a text via motor skills (hands) is faster than recalling and speaking it out?

# Answer
> 1 votes
I'm not sure I know a name for the phenomenon, but the general idea is that for patterns of info you retrieve consistently in certain ways (e.g., typing into a standard phone key pad), you have formed consist mappings between your cognitions and your motor responses. The original work on this was done by Richard Shiffrin and Walt Schneider (1976, 1977?). Their works is real low-level, but what you have done is automatized a certain retrieval-execution circuit that "fires off" less-optimally when someone asks for that info in a different circumstance (e.g., on the phone with someone you have never talked to before like a tech rep), and you have to generate it without other tactile and visual cues (like a keyboard).

Hope that helps. If you google scholar "skill automization" there will be a rabbit-hole of information 40 years deep. I think there is a chapter by Reason in 1990? that has come cool, easy to digest implications of automization for errors in behavior and thought (e.g. "Freudian slips").

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Tags: memory, motor
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# Question
Title: The article "Vector reconstruction from Firing Rates" of Abbott and Salinas
Is anyone familiar with this article?

I am reading it, and it is basically very clear. But still, some points are not clear to me.

For example, how is equation (7.1) in page 12:

> $Q\_{i,j}^{-1} = F(\overline C\_i \overline C\_j)$

It it said there that

> "*By rotational invariance, the correlation matrix element $Q\_{i,j}$ and the corresponding inverse element $Q\_{i,j}^{-1}$ can only depend on $\overline C\_i \cdot \overline C\_j$*".

Does anyone here, by any chance, know what is "rotational invariance"?

Thank you!

# Answer
What they mean is that as long as you rotate $C\_i$ and $C\_j$ by the same amount, the dot product will be the same. This is rotational invariance because the dot product is invariant to coherent rotation of the relevant vectors.

In neural terms, the correlation between the activity of two neurons (in a population representing a one dimensional circular variable) is a function of the difference in their preferred orientations and does not depend on the absolute direction of their orientations.
> 2 votes

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Tags: theoretical-neuroscience, computational-modeling
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# Question
Title: Do dreams repeat/continue? Or is it just a perception that a dream repeated?
During lucid dreaming, we sometimes feel that it is a repetition of (or in someway related to) a previous dream, but when we wake up, we can't recollect the first instance of such a dream. Why is this so?

# Answer
> 6 votes
*Disclaimer: My answer is about recurrent dreams. I don't have any immediate sources to consult on the continuation part (and there are less references to it in literature), but I'd be very surprised if it is any different.*

# Theories

Firstly, there are many of theories that support the notion of recurring dreams. I know not of a single one that (explicitly or even reasonably implicitly) rejects such thing.

# On cognitive perception

Secondly, you talk about *perception*, which in cognitive terms equates *conscious access* (rather than *sensing* in everyday language). So if you can (consciously) perceive it, it must be a genuine mental process that made it available (with the sole exception below).

# Subjective reports = objective measurements

Thirdly, recurring dreams have been reported and studied for decades (in your case I'd probably start with \[1\]). Most of dream science is natively based on subjective reports. But recently, scientists have shown that monitored **brain activity** is **in agreement** with, and can **even predict**, those subjective reports \[2\].

So we really have all reasons to believe that what we perceive as a dream is what we actually dream.

# Possible exception?

The one exception for this, and it is **my own informed suspicion**, is that we *may* still have a Déjà vu (déjâ rêvé, in the question context) while dreaming - so it may be a false sensation after all. It is **the same informed suspicion** that tells me that if this happens at all, it should be **extremely rare**.

# Sleep's low retention

As for the latter part of your question:

> we can't recollect the first instance of such a dream. Why is this so?

If one is to make **gross simplification**, during sleep:

* Your **long-term** memory is **'not available'** to remember stuff.
* Your **short-term** memory is even **more volatile** than it is while you're awake (there isn't central-executive process to exercise retention).

For the same reason, we often remember a dream just after waking up, but unless salient we fail to recall it shortly after.

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\[1\] Zadra, Antonio, and D. C. Donderi. *Nightmares and bad dreams: their prevalence and relationship to well-being.* Journal of abnormal psychology 109.2 (2000): 273.

\[2\] Horikawa, Tomoyasu, et al. *Neural decoding of visual imagery during sleep.* Science 340.6132 (2013): 639-642.

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Tags: memory, dreams
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title: Why do people talk (or communicate)?

text:
# Question
Title: Why do people talk (or communicate)?
I think that people talk for planning immediate benefits or planning future benefits. For example if someone wants to eat a fruit on a tree but he doesn't know how to get it so he asks someone to get it for him so he talks. So do you think that these are the correct reasons why people talk?

# Answer
> 1 votes
We evolved from animals which live in groups. Social animals such as chimpanzees (our closest relatives) communicate to one another to warn of danger, call for help, express emotions, etc. In a broader sense, there are advantages to living in groups: Mutual defense, stronger attacks on prey, ability to share resources...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution\_of\_human\_intelligence#Social\_brain\_hypothesis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociobiology

# Answer
> 0 votes
From psycholinguistic point of view, communication helps to understand others behaviour better even in a non-verbal way, economic basis of communication is the fact that humans are wanting beings who need things from food to luxuries and therefore need to communicate, evolutionarily, I would suppose communication help to adapt more to our environment. Consider your own self when you are sick and need to talk to those around or a doctor, without communication, would that be possible? You may want more about the usefulness of communication, see a brief summary here http://geniuslight.blogspot.com.ng/2015/11/psycholinguistics.html

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Tags: social-psychology, communication, speech, speech-comprehension
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title: Database of EEG signal phenomenon

text:
# Question
Title: Database of EEG signal phenomenon
I'm working on a paper describing the current state of EEG headsets used as computer interfaces. One of the things that is key for building a system using an EEG headset as a controller is having some known EEG response to detect. Examples I've been learning about are the P300, the SSVEP, motor-image-related changes in mu & beta rhythm amplitudes, and slow cortical potentials.

Has anyone created a common database or textbook of known phenomenon like these? I'm not talking about implementations that detect and use the signal changes, but rather a comprehensive list of everything currently known about EEG data. Everything that can be reliably reproduced, regardless of whether the underlying brain function is understood.

# Answer
> 3 votes
If you have learned about the P300, Steven Luck's An introduction to the event-related potential technique (2014) will be of interest; the SSVEP and motor-image-related changes are used in BCI, so this book "Brain-Computer Interfaces: Principles and Practice" by John and Elizabeth Wolpaw will be helpful.

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Tags: eeg, brain-computer-interface
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# Question
Title: Could brainwaves be the fenomena gives rise to consciousness
I have speculated for a long time that brain waves could be the "location" of human consciousness or indeed the "soul". My argument for this is the following:

* They vary with different states of consciousness, like dreaming.
* They cover the brain as a whole and have provides coherence like the perception of time
* I heard about an experiment with a man with severe secures that had his brain cut of in two with no neural connections. He didn't get a split personality and could perform functions that involved both halves of the brain. That told me that there couldn't be a completely neural explanation to consciousness. So which other mechanism do we know that could bridge that gap and provide a coherent self awareness combining the two brain halves: brain waves.
* They may appear simple on the outside of the scull but on the inside they could display very rich characteristics.
* Neural nets does not have brain waves and doesn't exhibit any signs of consciousness even though they have some kind of intelligence.

What kind of experiment could validate this hypothesis?

What does research say on this matter?

What do you think about this idea in general?

# Answer
In a famous experiment Luigi Galvani conducted in 1780, he observed that a dead frog leg was twitching when electricity was applied to its nerves. Following your line of argument, electricity would be the meta-physical phenomena that gives rise to life.

Brainwaves are the signature of neural activity; we capture them through electrical measurements. We couldn't have observed them had it not been for neurons communicating.

The most established and empirically-supported theory we have on consciousness demonstrates that consciousness is the result of a **cortex-wide neural discharges on a highly connected 'master' network** that has access to, and can 'extract' control of all lower-level networks.

If this sounds overly complicated, think of an octopus that sees all the lights and can press all the buttons.

If you want to learn (a lot) more on consciousness and brainwaves, I recommend you read *Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts* by Stanislas Dehaene, which is a highly accessible text.
> 1 votes

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Tags: consciousness, awareness
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title: Peer relationships measurement

text:
# Question
Title: Peer relationships measurement
Is there a method for measuring peer relationships in university students (e.g., a questionnaire)?

I am looking for a questionnaire that can be used to asses the level of peer relationship among students. In other words, how students are able to relate to their peers.

# Answer
Yes. This field of research is known as **social network analysis**, or *SNA*. It existed well before Facebook et al. hijacked the term.

Various resources will include sample questionnaires and the mathematical analysis applied (Networks: An Introduction was for me by far the clearest text on the mathematics of networks; a lot of books on SNA are off-putting once you get to the maths part).

You may also want to google for graph databases (eg, neo4j). I'm pretty sure I've seen a few examples of such analysis floating about.
> 1 votes

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Tags: social-psychology, measurement, psychology
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# Question
Title: What psychological disorders have frequent and rapid anger outbursts?
I'm interested in the mechanism behind a personality that can outburst anger rapidly and consistently for a long period. I've done some research and stumbled upon this issue described by *multiple different people*, typically about a female rejecting her partner, which makes me think it has some biological basis.

Within a certain time after a relationship starts, 6 months to 4 years an otherwise very desirable woman starts to have explosive anger outbursts over trivial issues and big issues alike. The words spoken and faults given during these temper outbursts does not matter, yet they follow a remarkably similar pattern:

* very rapid onset (15 seconds or less from baseline to angry) and long duration (up to 3 hours to flare up again)
* near total suppression of logical ability (will not see logic or reason)
* total shut down of empathy (makes very hurtful comments, emotionally abusive)
* significant drop in self awareness (can't see that acting like this is not appropriate and feels self justified)
* perception changes (you ALWAYS do that, you NEVER do this)
* does not want to be touched and actively rejects attempts at physical comforting
* pushes the man out or continues the episode till the man can't take it any more and leaves
* poor recollection of what happened during the episode later
* likely to occur after 1 month of cohabitation, and can occur within days of having sex

I've additionally gathered that men in these relationship assume more "feminine" role, while women are more "masculine". I've seen reports of a man bending over backwards to please such woman for years, yet this does not help.

Otherwise the couple say they still love each other and can function normally.

The almost universally given advice is: run, flee, end it. So it appears that behavior is aimed at and quite successful at forcing separation.

**Question**: Is this some kind of personality disorder? Is there a more scientific term I can use to look up this behavior?

**UPDATE: since the question is closed**, I will add answer here, as it took me a long time to find relevant info.

The mechanism described here is a clearly observable, biological, cyclical in nature, but it is only a tip of the iceberg of a cluster B personality disordered woman. This pattern of violent outbursts and push/pull dynamics is consistent with borderline personality disorder About 75% cases of BPD are female. I'm amazed at how many books are written on the subject by people who survived relationships with these women. (the male opposite is narcissistic personality disordered men, who deal just as much damage to women)

BPD/NPD has also been described as extremely low agreeableness and emotional stability on big 5 personality traits. During the courtship period, the undesirable traits are obfuscated from the potential partner (so woman who's more disagreeable than 95% of people may look like only 75% disagreeable). That's a major difference which is the cause of much unhappiness in such relationships.

BPD women are quite numerous are prone to emotionally violent anger outbursts, "Projecting" undesirable qualities onto the partner as a mechanism of self defense and avoiding any attempts to point out the pattern. Anecdotal evidence from countless sources suggests it is impossible to argue with a borderline disordered woman, or convince her to get help, as it results in the following:

* Projection or blame shifting onto the partner
* Threats of separation
* Emotional abuse
* "Circular arguments" that solve nothing

Sometimes these women experience moments of clarity, which only confuse the partner. These moments do not last long. Anecdotal evidence suggests BPD women are very resistant to therapy, and I've read accounts of up to 15 years of seeing psychiatrists/psychologists pass without any change.

It is common for the partner to somehow start accepting blame/fault for these violent outbursts, resulting in a lot of frustrated, depressed and beat up partners and husbands.

# Answer
> 6 votes
Most of your list fits for symptoms of lack of will to cooperate. Lack of will to cooperate is likely triggered by lack of sympathy, which again may be triggered by lack of trust. I say 'may' because there are several possible reasons that such situations may occur. Lack of will to cooperate may also be due to personality traits, especially due to low score in the Big 5 personaliy trait **Agreeableness**. Agreeableness scores the tendency for which a person prefers to cooperate and be altruistic, rather than antisocial and egosentric.

You also mention several signs of being very emotional. This will highly depend on the personality of the woman, more than the sitution itself. Some people naturally respond more emotionally and prefer to use their feelings when making judgments, as opposed to using logic. Emotional instability is especially typical for those with a high score in the Big 5 **Neuroticism** personality trait. Neuroticism scores the tendency for a person to be 'moody', change mood frequently, respond negatively, get anxious, suspicious and 'overreact'.

**Your 'kind of rejection" is not a 'biological defence mechanism by which a woman pushes an unsuitable mate out'. It is the response pattern of a personality type when discontent with another person, regardless of relation status or gender.**

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Tags: terminology, psychiatry, behavior, mood, personality-disorder
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title: Books about trust

text:
# Question
Title: Books about trust
Could you recommend me some books that cover trust and how it is developed, what helps us build trust and why we might or might not need it.

I am not interested in the relationship self-help books but a more philosophical and psychological approach to the whole issue, discussions about the development of trust in the recent years and how it is affecting the society, how trust emerges and what factors influence it.

Your help is very much appreciated,

GreenJack

# Answer
> 2 votes
The only book I know of in that field is Francis Fukuyama's *'Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity'*.

I haven't read it yet, but

* if it is anywhere near the quality of the Fukuyama books I have read, it will be excellent, perhaps even amazing, and
* given what he says about trust in the book I'm reading right now (*'Political Order and Political Decay'*), I would bet on amazing.

Hope this helps.

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Tags: social-psychology, personality, decision-making, psychology
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