Test: Brain And Psychology - Happiness, Sleep, Conditioning, Memory And Intelligence

Body Language: http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/3MaJo0/:1DeP.Rmr@:Mz.hzh1Y/www.cracked.com/photoplasty_996_24-scientific-ways-to-influence-people-without-saying-word

This post has mostly quotes along with the sources.

http://www.brainline.org/multimedia/interactive_brain/the_human_brain.html?gclid=CIuu9Y-Foq8CFSsHRQodrhDEZw

Psychology

http://www.intropsych.com/ch01_psychology_and_science/specialities_within_psychology.html: Quote: "Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own special world to bring them up in, and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select-doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, beggerman and thief." - Hmm, I don't seem to be able to agree with this? Read this: http://vbala99.blogspot.com/2016/04/creativity-and-precociousness.html
Read about Critical thinking and "Avoid jumping to conclusions"
Scientific models:
Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence: http://www.intropsych.com/ch01_psychology_and_science/quack_science_syndrome.html
Quack watch: - this is not about duck brand of watches

Correlation: - Quote from article "For purposes of making a prediction, the underlying reason for a correlation may not matter. As long as the correlation is stable -lasting into the future-one can use it to make predictions. One does not need an accurate cause-effect explanation to make a prediction."
How can differences between groups be valuable? - Quote from this article: "Sometimes differences between groups of people are interesting in themselves. Researchers who study abnormal psychology find it significant when a mental disorder occurs in only one culture, not others. This suggests that the disorder may involve a belief system or genetic or environmental condition peculiar to that culture. On the other hand, if a mental disorder (like schizophrenia or depression) occurs in every culture, that suggests it is due to genes or conditions common to all humans."
Open and closed questionnaires - Quote from article:

"Researchers distinguish between open and closed questionnaires (Schwarz, 1999). Closed questionnaires require a respondent to pick from a list of items. Open questionnaires ask people to come up with the items themselves. The two procedures produce dramatically different results. One study found that 61.5% of a sample endorsed "To think for themselves" as "the most important thing for children to prepare them for life," as long as that was one of the choices. If people were asked to come up with their own list, they mentioned it only 4.6% of the time."
Type of scale used: "People may make different responses to a poll or survey depending upon the scale that is used. Schwarz (1999) gives the following example: What are some examples of how scales can influence results? When asked how successful they had been in life, 34% of a representative sample reported high success when the numeric value of the rating scale ranged from -5 to 5, whereas only 13% did so when the numeric values ranged from 0 to 10."
Wording of questions:
Bias: Quote from this link - "Demand characteristics can involve any information that biases a person's response to research. Once a 14 year old student wrote to me asking for help with a science fair project. She wanted to test the ability of fellow students to detect and discriminate odors. I suggested that she explore the effects of demand characteristics by having people sit down in front of a table with fragrant objects like fruit and perfume bottles, then (after they put on a blindfold) asking them to identify completely different things that were not on the table. The student wrote back a month later and said the experiment produced interesting results. People's answers depended more on what they saw on the table before the experiment than on what they actually sniffed during the experiment, even though the student said nothing to them about the objects on the table."
Double blind design:

Brain, Memory, Intelligence:

Intuition and analytical intelligence: Beautiful description (MBTI type)
Left and right hemispheres (read about the woman and me / it: . Apparently reading maps and emotions are both part of the right hemisphere.
Types of intelligence: - Wonder why sculpture is classified under spatial intelligence instead of under Bodily-kinesthetic. Quote from this page: "major categories of intelligence that can be subdivided further. For example, a person who is good at one type of math might be poor at another. One might be a great essayist but a lousy poet, although both involve linguistic intelligence"
Unconscious thought process:
Apparently Learning typically begins with the unconscious - this is exactly what I figured - meaning what we know best is what we learned unconsciously.
Linear and intuitive thinking: - Quote: "Analytic thinking characteristically proceeds a step at a time. Steps are explicit and usually can be accurately reported... Such thinking proceeds with relatively full awareness of the information and operations involved. It may involve careful and deductive reasoning, often using mathematics or logic and an explicit plan of attack. Or it may involve a step-by-step process of induction and experiment... Intuitive thinking characteristically does not advance in careful, well-planned steps. Indeed, it tends to involve maneuvers based seemingly on an implicit perception of the total problem. The thinker arrives at an answer, which may be right or wrong, with little if any awareness of the process by which he reached it." - again this seems to be in sync with my belief that F and N (as in MBTI) are kinda similar.

Sleep

REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep and Non Rem Sleep: Quote - "The weird stories are almost always REM dreams; the fragments of normal thought are almost always non-REM dreams. Non-REM dreams, by contrast, feel like ordinary thinking."
Dream recallers and non-recallers: Quote: "Research has confirmed that everybody dreams, usually four or five times a night. People who say they "never dream" actually have as many dreams as other people. They simply wake up more slowly and lose touch with the mental activity occurring during sleep."
Inaccurate reporting of insomnia: Quote: "A woman with a 25-year history of insomnia...entered [a sleep] laboratory. In four successive nights, "she fell asleep quickly, slept more than eight hours per night, and had normal architecture of sleep stages."..."Each morning, however, she reported that she 'didn't sleep a wink.' Patients consistently exaggerate their insomnia...[Webb] describes pseudo-insomnia (false insomnia) as a complaint of "no sleep" which turns out to be frequent awakenings in an otherwise-normal succession of sleep stages. During each awakening the individual evidently thinks, "I'm still awake; I haven't slept a wink," but such people average about six hours of genuine sleep per night in between their awakenings."

Conditioning

Hypnosis: Quote: "During hypnosis, a person is hypersuggestible or easily influenced. The hypnotized person is focused on the instructions given by another person. Hypnosis can sometimes enhance memory for long-forgotten events. However, hypnotized people are notorious for fabricating false memories that they later believe to be true."
D prime: Signal and noise estimation: Here and here
Classical conditioning: - Quote: "Different labels are used to describe the two modes: serial vs. parallel processing, intellectual vs. emotional processing, head vs. heart, analytic vs. intuitive thought, conscious vs. unconscious thought, and so forth. Classical conditioning comes down squarely on the "parallel, emotional, heart, intuitive, unconscious" side. The effects of classical conditioning are automatic. They tend to involve emotional processes rather than intellectual processes. They are involuntary rather than a result of will power. This distinction proves to be important when discussing the applications of classical conditioning to psychotherapy. Almost by definition, people requesting therapy are facing an unpleasant emotional reaction they cannot control simply by wishing it away or exercising conscious effort. That is why they seek help. In almost every case, the unpleasant emotional reaction can be analyzed as a case of classical conditioning." The set of adjectives within quotes is exceedingly interesting (refer to MBTI). F, N heart all go together!!
Pavlov's dog - Reflex: Quote: "Pavlov's dog and Watson's fingertip illustrate the basic pattern found in all classical conditioning. An organism learns that a signal predicts the activation of a reflex. After learning this, the organism reacts to the signal with an anticipatory response similar to the reflex response."
Classic vs operant conditioning: - Quote: "If the reflex is activated by a signal, then one is talking about classical conditioning. If the animal is engaging in something like exploratory or strategic activity followed by payoff or a punishment, then one is talking about operant conditioning."
Human problems: Quotes: "The list of possible human problems is never ending. Most can be defined in behavioral terms. In other words, most problems can be described in terms of some observable, measurable activity (behavior) that must be made either more frequent or less frequent. That is the essence of the behavioral approach: problems are defined as behaviors that can be made more frequent or less frequent, and the therapy consists of applying conditioning techniques to make the desired changes."
Shaping: Teaching a dog to catch a frisbee:
Stopping a child from headbanging by electrical shock

Memory and intelligence (Shall we call it Part 2?):

Poorly constructed MCQ
Memory as a construction
Various stages of storage
Memory storage and retrieval efficiency: "Human memory seems to work better, not worse, when a person adds elaborate encoding schemes, as long as they provide organization to aid memory retrieval."
Kinds of secondary memory
Declarative or procedural memory
Analytics vs holistic thinking: Excellent page. Quote - "Intelligence is paying careful skilled attention to the analysis of relations... Intelligence is an attentional/processing skill used in analyzing and mentally reconstructing relations. The distinguishing feature of this skill is breaking complex relations (or problems) into small steps that can be dealt with fully. The major components of the skill are extensive search and careful apprehension of all details relevant to the relation; thorough utilization of all available information including prior knowledge; accurate comparisons; and sequential, step-by-step analysis and construction.... Holistic people often excel in social situations requiring sensitivity, intuition and tact. Their ability to get a general feeling about a situation may open their minds to subtle nuances of complex situations. Using computer jargon, a holistic person might be regarded as a parallel processor. That would be the case if a correct response evolves out of widespread simultaneous activity instead of resulting from a controlled, step by step process." In effect, this is the difference between NF and T (as in MBTI). Note that I am not mentioning "NT". This is because N is not neutral to F and T. N goes more with F. NT is not a type of T as MBTI would have us believe.
Effective and ineffective problem solvers
Learning to learn
Adaptive intelligence

What reinforcements work? Read this and this.
Phobias as prepared learning: Read this and this. Excellent. Quote - "Animals commonly have built-in circuits to trigger avoidance of stimuli indicating danger. For example, a Central American bird called the motmot preys on snakes, but it must avoid the poisonous coral snake. Coral snakes have a distinctive color pattern consisting of red, yellow and black rings, so motmots are born with a fear of this pattern. Smith (1975) reared some motmots by hand, to insure they never saw a coral snake. She then exposed them to a series of models-wooden tubes painted rings or stripes of various colors. She reported: 'The motmots had no hesitation in pecking at plain red, yellow, green, blue or unpainted wooden models. However, the bird's initial reaction to the solid yellow and red ring model was one of avoidance: all flew up to the opposite corner of the cage and in many cases gave alarm notes.'" Read this also.
Mating behavior: Quote - "Social status often has a direct impact on reproductive success. Less dominant animals may be excluded from mating entirely. "Tournaments" are common in many species. The winners get the healthiest, highest ranking mates. That does not prevent lower status animals from trying to reproduce, but they may not be successful. In animals as in humans, it is common for lower status males to "aim too high" and be rejected by desirable females. What happens if a low-status ram is sent, alone, into a flock of ewes? ...In New Zealand,...researchers have reversed the apparent infertility of some rams by including them in a group of other rams sent into a flock of ewes, instead of sending them into the flock by themselves, as is current practice. Apparently, a class structure is strong among sheep, and mating is related to dominance. A dominant ram mates best with a dominant ewe, a less dominant ram with a less dominant ewe, and so on, down to the least dominant sheep. However, when a lone ram is released among a flock of ewes , he will invariably attempt to mate with the ewe that is most obviously at the height of estrus. But she will probably reject him if he is not at the right dominance level"
Evolutionary psychology: Very interesting article here and here.
Animal consciousnesses: - Animals do not know words and do not think. They live in the moment. Animals seem to be P's. Does evolution cause P's to become J's. Apart from human beings (and ants as in the Ant and Grasshopper story?) J behavior is not prevalent among living species.
Animal information processing:
Intelligence of bees: The speed, the direction of their dance give indications about location, quantity of food.
Intelligence in chimpanzees:
Happiness: Quote - "Perhaps such social variables as lack of respect and lack of trusted friends make [more unhappiness] than poverty."
Entrepreneurs and success: Quote - "there is a subtle and possibly important difference between (1) seeking life activities which "play to your strengths," which is certainly natural if people want to feel competent, and (2) the enjoyment of mastering new skills described above as typical of successful entrepreneurs. These are not the same thing. If you merely seek situations that make you feel competent, you are likely to exercise old skills, and you are unlikely to advance. The people who succeeded as entrepreneurs were those who sought competency in new skills." WOWOWOW
Different kinds of patterns we may excel at
Cognitive dissonance (the link http://www.intropsych.com/ch09_motivation/festingers_theory_of_cognitive_dissonance.htm is not working as on 13th Dec 2015)): Quote - "Ben Franklin gave some peculiar advice that makes sense in the context of cognitive dissonance theory. Franklin said if you want someone to like you, get that person to do you a favor. This works because, once the person has put out time and energy to help you, the person must develop an attitude consistent with the behavior. So, to avoid dissonance, the person likes you... If you want to dislike someone, do them wrong. There is perhaps no surer way of infecting ourselves with virulent hatred toward a person than by doing him a grave injustice. Hoffer pointed out that, after the Nazis had started persecuting the Jews, it became easier for the average German citizen to hate the Jews. As a rule, cognitive dissonance theory predicts that attitudes and behaviors will remain "in sync." If you change your attitudes, then presumably your behavior will change. More surprisingly, if you change a person's behavior, the person will often change attitudes to match the behavior."
Motivation: Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, Sour grapes and forbidden fruit and Reverse psychology
Maslow's Self actualizers: The definition is very interesting. Quote from here: "Maslow concluded: These moments (happiest, ecstatic moments of rapture) were of pure, positive happiness when all doubts, all fears, all inhibitions, all tensions, all weaknesses were left behind". This apparently was written in 1968. And it is uncannily similar to what John Galt says to Dagny Taggart as he is carrying her after she crash lands her plane into his gulch in Atlas Shrugged. "Can you bring about these experiences at will? No! Or almost entirely no! In general we are "Surprised by Joy"... Peaks come unexpectedly, suddenly they happen to us. You can't count on them. And hunting them is a little like hunting happiness. It's best not done directly. It comes as a by-product...for instance, of doing a fine job at a worthy task with which you identify."
Emotions

Emotion theory: Quote - "Emotions are not always subject to intellectual control. This is one reason psychotherapy often involves getting rid of bad emotional responses—something a person cannot necessarily do using willpower alone."
Where do emotions arise? Quote - "A 'weak' theory does not claim anything very controversial, while a 'strong' theory may claim a lot but is less likely to be true. Emotions arise in the brain. Emotion is not a response to changes in the body [as was originally supposed by James-Lange]."
Ekman's Facial Expressions
Tears and crying
Is stress always a result of negative emotions?
Left and right hemispheric differences in emotion: Left causes euphoria, right causes guilt, despair etc apparently. Quote - "In the bipolar disorder ("manic-depression") the system oscillates wildly between the two extremes... A person with a healthy, well-adjusted emotional life experiences the appropriate emotional response in situations of danger or situations of opportunity." from here.
Amgdyla in the brain is the place where emotions are centered.

Genes

Genes vs heridity: Quote - "What would have happened if Wayne Gretzky had grown up in Mexico instead of Canada? He might have been a very good athlete, but probably he would not have been a hockey player. What if Gretzky had grown up in Canada but under conditions of extreme poverty, so his caretakers could not afford to enroll him in the junior hockey league? What if another hockey player was already called The Great One and Gretzky was called Number Two? Such environmental factors might have altered the outcome of his career. Genes are important, but they do not determine what we become, they only provide a potential." This is interesting from the point of view of fatalism.
Heritability index: Quote - "Other things being equal, identical twins are strikingly more likely to make similar life choices or experience similar life events. The distinction between dizygotic (coming from 2 eggs) and monozygotic (identical, coming from single egg) twins is used to calculate a measure of "genetic influence" called a heritability index. The heritability index is the amount of statistical variability (in test scores or other measurements) accounted for by genes... In other words, the heritability index tells you how well you could predict a measurement obtained from one identical twin, given a measurement of the same varable obtained from the other twin. What does the heritability index tell us? The heritability index is what people are usually referring to when they make statements such as, "the genetic component of homosexuality is somewhere between 30% and 70%." The component referred to here is a statistical concept. It is like saying, 'the expected error in your prediction of sexual orientation is reduced by 30-70%, if you know the sexual orientation of the identical twin.'... High heritability indexes do not demonstrate that a behavior is "coded in the genes. A high heritability index merely indicates that, for the variable being measured, identical twins are much more similar than fraternal twins."
Odor: Quote - "Possibly the earliest and most primitive form of communication between mother and infant is based on odor. Michael Russell of the University of California did a series of studies that showed that babies only a month and a half old could distinguish the odor of breast pads worn by their mothers from those worn by nursing strangers. Porter also showed in follow-up research that 16 of 20 mothers were able to distinguish the odor of clothing worn by their own children from that of other children. "
Sound perception while still in the womb - this is amazingly similar to the story of Ashtakavakra
Infant information processing:
Securely attached and anxiously attached infants
Shyness: Apparently this trait sticks to a person from toddlerhood. Quote - "Kagan and colleagues noted that most of their shy subjects were younger children in multi-child families, while many of the outgoing children were older children. The researchers speculated that older children might contribute to shyness in their younger brothers or sisters through such domineering tactics as grabbing away toys when the younger children were still vulnerable toddlers. However, Kagan and other researchers at Harvard were also aware of the emerging evidence relating the amygdala to emotional regulation. Kagan and Snidman proposed a theory of shyness that blamed it on an overactive amygdala. Obviously the two types of influence-biological and environmental-are intertwined. Biology affects learning, and vice versa. A child with an overactive amygdala might be more likely to develop learned avoidance behaviors, resulting in a shy child."
Socialization and sex roles
Parenting styles
Sensory-motor period: Quote - "Infants act as though a hidden object ceases to exist. To very young children—younger than about 6 months—"out of sight" is not only "out of mind" but also "out of existence." If a toy eagerly pursued by a 4 month old slips under a blanket, it is no longer pursued...even if it makes an obvious bump."
Pre-operational stage (18 months to 5 years): "Egocentric means self-centered or unable to take the viewpoint of someone else. If you face a child of three and ask the child to "raise the same hand I am raising" (then raise your right hand) the child will raise the left hand. Why? Evidently the child fails to reverse positions or take your place mentally. This changes a year or two later, when children start to realize other people can have a different perspective. Children of preschool age show the egocentric perspective in social behavior, as well... Little children will pester adults even after being told that the parent needs some time to concentrate on an important task like studying. The small child is not trying to be selfish; he or she simply fails to appreciate the mental perspective of the other person."
Piaget's experiments on children: Read about the Plowden report that talks about primary schooling, a report that was the result of Piaget's work.
Appearance and reality differences (3 and 6 year olds) - Read the book Cognitive Development by John Flavell
Summary of childhood
American teenagers
Persistence of personality: Quote - "William James wrote in 1887, "In most of us, by the age of 30, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again." Like most easy generalizations in psychology, this poses a challenge to researchers. Some would like to show that James is wrong: personality can change during adulthood. But research into personality change in adulthood largely supports James's conclusion."... "Jack Block, of the University of California at Berkeley, is known for the longest and most thorough study of personality change in adulthood. Block's sample was first studied when they were teenagers, again in their mid-30s, and again their mid-40s. Block used multiple, independent judges to assess personality. He took special care to prevent bias, concealing the identity of the subjects each time. Even so, the match between early and later personality assessments was striking...The most self-defeating adolescents were the most self-defeating adults; cheerful teenagers were cheerful 40-year-olds; those whose moods fluctuated when they were in junior high school were still experiencing mood swings in midlife." WOWOWOW While the link indicates a good amount of stability, especially in shyness and extraversion and introversion, till old age - it implies by absence that not everything remains same with age. I wonder what changes.
Age related changes in intelligence: Very interesting
Death: Quote - "death is total and irreversible cessation of brain function." - Half the world's living population of men and women would have to be considered dead as per this definition. Huh.

Suicide and Death

Suicide: Quotes: "Suicide appears to result from individual psychological factors more than family problems. The best predictor of suicide is a history of previous suicide attempts. Suicide has a moderate tendency to run in families. "A person from a family of someone who attempts suicide has a higher risk of suicidality than someone from a family with no suicide attempts"
Death and dying by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
Near death experiences
Unexpected death of loved ones

Personality and Trait

Traits vs types
Convergence of 5 basic traits
Genetic influences on personality: Quote - "The Freedmans decided to make behavioral comparisons between infants of differing ethnic backgrounds. They figured that newborn infants were still too young to be influenced by culture, so behavioral differences would probably be due to genetic differences. They located pregnant women of European or Chinese ancestry in the San Francisco area. The two groups were matched on such variables as years spent in the United States, quality of prenatal care, and income level. The babies of these mothers were tested soon after birth. Sure enough, there were big differences in temperament. The American babies cried loudly when angry and were hard to calm. The Chinese babies stopped crying almost immediately when picked up. The American babies turned their heads vigorously if a cloth was placed on the nose. (The Freedmans pointed out this was listed in American pediatric textbooks as the "normal" response.) However, the Chinese babies merely breathed through their mouths when their noses were covered."
Bouchards twin research
Defense mechanisms
Antisocial personality
Autistm
Types of developmental disorders
Psychology and Law
Computer generated profiles
Petuxant - Behavior modification system in prisons - very interesting.

Social psychology:

Conformity: J Curve
Factors of persuasion
Sleeper effect
Brainwashing
Cognitive dissonance (CD): Quote: "The existence of dissonance, being psychologically uncomfortable, will motivate the person to try to reduce the dissonance and achieve consonance...One of its [CD] greatest assets is that it makes predictions that often contradict common sense. ". Isn't that great? Read also this.
Attribution and emotion: See this also: Quote - "In general, people tend to make an "external" attribution of their own behavior and an "internal" attribution of other people's behavior. Often there is no evidence to justify this type of attribution, but it is very common, so this cognitive bias is called the fundamental attribution error" - I am amazed.
Biasing effects in person perception: After reading all this I believe there is so much weight in advertising and in the power of the word - that has a terrible impact probably overriding the impact of original content. See also the next bullet point. Where does content stand with packaging having so much weight?
What is beautiful is good
Self fulfilling prophecy
Confirmation bias
Aggression: Quote - "In primate societies of all different types, status-seeking leads to aggression. Animals are aggressive to others in order to dominate them, ward of romantic rivals, and keep a high position in a group hierarchy"
Zimbardo's prison study: Quote - "The Zimbardo prison study, like the Milgram study, was valuable in showing how easily ordinary people could slip into a brutal and aggressive pattern of behavior, especially if it was approved by an authority." Amazing, this explains the behavior of common German during Nazi Germany's time.
Modeling behavior: Quote - "the same principle was operating with helpful behavior as with aggressive behavior. People notice the behavior of a model. If they see helpful behavior by another person, they are more likely to show helpful behavior themselves. Although the principle is simple, the implications are profound. Random acts of kindness might rub off on other people. Kindly behavior is imitated. If this occurs on a large scale, everybody can benefit."

Sexual development

Read this and this
Menstruation: Quote - "Menstruation may be delayed in girls who are thin and exercise vigorously."
Adult sexual arousal
Kiss: Quote - "Sex is not usually accompanied by kissing unless emotional intimacy is desired. Martha Stein observed 64 call girls from a hidden vantage point, recording the details of 1,230 sexual encounters. She found that kissing was involved in only 36% of the encounters and that most of a prostitute's customers (87%) were not interested in romance or intimacy. They wanted quick sex. Kissing, seduction, and sweet talk were not part of the picture."
Orgasm: Read this, this and also this
Friendship
Ideal friend: Quote - " An ideal friend is sincere, honest, loyal, truthful, trustworthy, and dependable. A person with these characteristics is predictable in a good way: steadfast and true...that some men who consider themselves unlucky in love suffer from a mismatching syndrome. They target women who are far more attractive and socially desirable than themselves. Naturally, these men are often rejected. They may make despairing comments about their luck, but the problem seems to be a lack of realistic judgment about their own attractiveness. Typically, these men are rated as not very attractive, but—perhaps with their goals influenced by the beautiful people in ads and magazines—they will not consider dating a woman who is rated as unattractive as themselves." Rather unfortunate that the adjectives listed above have so much of overlap with each other. Maybe a smaller list like HONEST, LOYAL, dependable may have been better.
Infatuation: Quote - "People sometimes act as though they think intensity of love predicts durability. That is not the case. Research suggests that intensity of feeling is negatively correlated with long-term success of a relationship. One group of researchers administered a 'love scale" measuring degree of passion to college couples. They found "the subjects with the very highest scores at the outset were the ones whose relationships tended not to last'"
Six types of love:
Sex and aggression: Very interesting anecdote about Jerry and Kim in this link.
Successful long term relationships:
The four horsemen: Contempt being the worst.

Characteristics of a Good Theory: 1. They predict, 2. are parsimonious 3. provide ideas for future research 4. are falsifiable. Very nice.. Aren't the 1st and the last points kinda same?
Consciousness: Quote - "But in some cases consciousness may become aversive, for instance when we become aware that we are not living up to our own goals or expectations, or when we believe that other people perceive us negatively. In these cases we may engage in behaviors that help us escape from consciousness, for example through the use of alcohol or other psychoactive drug."
Growing and developing: Very interesting: Quote - "The inability of young children to view transitions also leads them to be egocentric — unable to readily see and understand other people’s view points. Developmental psychologists define the theory of mind as the ability to take another person’s viewpoint,and the ability to do so increases rapidly during the preoperational stage. In one demonstration of the development of theory of mind, a researcher shows a child a video of another child(let’s call her Anna) putting a ball in a red box. Then Anna leaves the room, and the video shows that while she is gone, a researcher moves the ball from the red box into a bluebox. As the video continues, Anna comes back in to the room.The child is then asked to point to the box where Anna will probably look to find her ball. Children who are younger than 4 years of age typically are unable to understand that Anna does not know that the ball has been moved, and they predict that she will look for it in the blue box. After 4 years of age,however,children have developed a theory of mind — they realize that different people can have different view points, and that (although she will be wrong) Anna will nevertheless think that the ball is still in the red box." Read also about the experiment on infant monkeys with 2 surrogate mothers - one of whom only provided milk and the other only provided comfort - the infants tended to spend much more time with the mother that provided comfort (but no milk). Jesus - this is too difficult to digest. Content (milk) seems less and less important to packaging (comfort). Read also the neat example on morality of a man stealing a life saving drug from a pharmacy in the same link. Other interesting stuff in the article

Males tend to value principles of justice while females value caring and helping. (T vs F as in MBTI) - interesting.
Demandingness and responsiveness of parents shown as a matrix. I wonder whether the same is true for teacher-student relationships.
How menopause is seen by women in US vis-a-vis India.
Second order conditioning, primary & secondary reinforcers
Explicit and implicit memory - recall and recognition memory probably is similar to K(nowledge) and C(omprehension), respectively.
Short term memory (STM), L(ong)TM and encoding, spacing effect (which basically means that cramming a lot of material in a short period of time is less effective than spacing the reading over a larger period of time - just like a woman's way of eating 23 very small meals a day is better than a camel's way.)
Learning languages - impact of starting early vs starting later. Quote - "Language is more generative than it is imitative. Generativity refers to the fact that speakers of a language can compose sentences to represent new ideas that they have never before been exposed to."
Intelligence - Quotes are listed below:

"Virtually all psychologists now believe that there is a general intelligence factor that relates to abstract thinking and that includes the abilities to acquire knowledge, to reason abstractly, to adopt to novel situations and to benefit from instruction and experience.... Although the different types of questions [in an standardized IQ test] do correlate with each other, some items correlate more highly with each other than do other items; they form clusters or clumps of intelligences." WOWOWOW nice. And perhaps this leads also to difference between crystallized and fluid intelligence.
"Creativity and analytical intelligence are different (perhaps like induction and deduction, respectively). "The brain areas that are associated with convergent thinking, thinking that is directed towards finding the correct answer to a given problem [as in sudoku], are different from those associated with divergent thinking, the ability to generate many different ideas for or solutions to a given problem. Creativity needs expertise, imaginative thinking, risk taking, intrinsic interest, and working in a creative environment."
"The Wechsler Adult lntelligence Scale (WAIS) is the most widely used intelligence test for adults."
"studies have found that between 40% and 80% of the variability in IQ is due to genetics, meaning that overall genetics plays a bigger role than does environment in creating IQ differences among individuals... And the correlations between the IQs ofparents and their biological children (r=.42) is significantly greater than the correlation between parents and adopted children (r = .19)." WOWOWOW.
"The fact that intelligence becomes more stable as we get older provides evidence that early environmental experiences matter more than later ones."
"Environmental factor also explain why there is a greater variance in the intelligence levels of children in lower income households than in higher income ones. This is because upper class households tend to provide a safe, nutritious and supporting environment for children, whereas these factors are more variable in lower income households. Poverty may lead to diets that are undernourishing or lacking in appropriate vitamins which slow down brain development and reduce intelligence."
"Education has a causal effect on IQ. Children's IQ tends to drop significantly during summer vacations."
"A child who has higher than average intelligence will be treated differently than a child who has lower than average intelligence, and these differences in behaviors will likely amplify initial differences. This means that modest genetic differences can be multiplied into big differences overtime."
Emotional IQ and emotion regulation: Quote - "Although measures of the ability to understand, experience, and manage emotions may not predict effective behaviors,another important aspect of emotional intelligence — emotion regulation— does. Emotion regulation refers to the ability to control and productively use one’s emotions. Research has found that people who are better able to override their impulses to seek immediate gratification and who are less impulsive also have higher cognitive and social intelligence...Because emotional intelligence seems so important, many school systems have designed programs to teach it to their students. However, the effectiveness of these programs has not been rigorously tested, and we do not yet know whether emotional intelligence can be taught, or if learning it would improve the quality of people’s lives." WOWOWOW
The most fundamental emotions, known as the basic emotions, are those of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise.
Happiness: Taken together, it has been estimated that our wealth, health, and life circumstances account for only 15% to 20% of life satisfaction scores. Clearly the main ingredient in happiness lies beyond, or perhaps beneath, external factors.
"MBTI is not useful because the scores / results change over time and because MBTI scores do not relate to other measures of personality or to behavior. They cannot be used to predict behavior" - interesting.
Id, Ego,and Superego: Quote - "Freud proposed that the mind is divided into three components: id, ego, and superego, and that the interactions and conflicts among the components create personality. According to Freudian theory, the id is the component of personality that forms the basis of our most primitive impulses. The id is entirely unconscious, and it drives our most important motivations, including the sexual drive (libido) and the aggressive or destructive drive. According to Freud, the id is driven by the pleasure principle — the desire for immediate gratification of our sexual and aggressive urges. The id is why we smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, view pornography, tell mean jokes about people, and engage in other fun or harmful behaviors, often at the cost of doing more productive activities. In stark contrast to the id, the superego represents our sense of morality and oughts. The superego tell us all the things that we shouldn’t do, or the duties and obligations of society. The superego strives for perfection, and when we fail to live up to its demands we feel guilty. In contrast to the id, which is about the pleasure principle, the function of the ego is based on the reality principle—the idea that we must delay gratification of our basic motivations until the appropriate time with the appropriate outlet. The ego is the largely conscious controller or decision-maker of personality. The ego serves as the intermediary between the desires of the id and the constraints of society contained in the superego."
Quotes from here:

"Ability to rebound from failures explain achievement related behavior and perseverance." WOWOWOW This is perhaps what differentiates entrepreneurs from others...Clearly the main ingredient in happiness lies beyond, or perhaps beneath, external factors.
"Freedom, the ability to make up your mind and change your mind, is the friend of natural happiness but the enemy of synthetic happiness"
"Our level of happiness is not determined by our external circumstances. We all have a fairly stable happiness baseline. Genetics plays a major role in this. 50% of the people have a tendency to be optimistic and others to be pessimistic. Circumstances can veer us from our baseline but we revert to it soon. Lasting happiness comes doesn't not from changing our circumstances nor does it come from positive thinking but from a greater understanding of who we are." WOWOWOW "it has been estimated that our wealth, health, and life circumstances account for only 15% to 20% of life satisfaction scores." from here.

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7/3/15, 10:46 AM

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Monday, June 26, 2017

Brain And Psychology - Happiness, Sleep, Conditioning, Memory And Intelligence

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