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🔗 Psychology 🔗 Neuroscience 🔗 Physiology

The effects of stress on memory include interference with a person's capacity to encode memory and the ability to retrieve information. Stimuli, like stress, improved memory when it was related to learning the subject. During times of stress, the body reacts by secreting stress hormones into the bloodstream. Stress can cause acute and chronic changes in certain brain areas which can cause long-term damage. Over-secretion of stress hormones most frequently impairs long-term delayed recall memory, but can enhance short-term, immediate recall memory. This enhancement is particularly relative in emotional memory. In particular, the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex and the amygdala are affected. One class of stress hormone responsible for negatively affecting long-term, delayed recall memory is the glucocorticoids (GCs), the most notable of which is cortisol. Glucocorticoids facilitate and impair the actions of stress in the brain memory process. Cortisol is a known biomarker for stress. Under normal circumstances, the hippocampus regulates the production of cortisol through negative feedback because it has many receptors that are sensitive to these stress hormones. However, an excess of cortisol can impair the ability of the hippocampus to both encode and recall memories. These stress hormones are also hindering the hippocampus from receiving enough energy by diverting glucose levels to surrounding muscles.

Stress affects many memory functions and cognitive functioning of the brain. There are different levels of stress and the high levels can be intrinsic or extrinsic. Intrinsic stress level is triggered by a cognitive challenge whereas extrinsic can be triggered by a condition not related to a cognitive task. Intrinsic stress can be acutely and chronically experienced by a person. The varying effects of stress on performance or stress hormones are often compared to or known as "inverted-u" which induce areas in learning, memory and plasticity. Chronic stress can affect the brain structure and cognition.

Studies considered the effects of both intrinsic and extrinsic stress on memory functions, using for both of them Pavlovian conditioning and spatial learning. In regard to intrinsic memory functions, the study evaluated how stress affected memory functions that was triggered by a learning challenge. In regard to extrinsic stress, the study focused on stress that was not related to cognitive task but was elicited by other situations. The results determined that intrinsic stress was facilitated by memory consolidation process and extrinsic stress was determined to be heterogeneous in regard to memory consolidation. Researchers found that high stress conditions were a good representative of the effect that extrinsic stress can cause on memory functioning. It was also proven that extrinsic stress does affect spatial learning whereas acute extrinsic stress does not.

🔗 Economics 🔗 Books 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Anthropology

IQ and the Wealth of Nations is a 2002 book by psychologist Richard Lynn and political scientist Tatu Vanhanen. The authors argue that differences in national income (in the form of per capita gross domestic product) are correlated with differences in the average national intelligence quotient (IQ). They further argue that differences in average national IQs constitute one important factor, but not the only one, contributing to differences in national wealth and rates of economic growth.

The book has drawn widespread criticism from other academics. Critiques have included questioning of the methodology used, the incompleteness of the data, and the conclusions drawn from the analysis. The 2006 book IQ and Global Inequality is a follow-up to IQ and the Wealth of Nations by the same authors.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Philosophy/Ancient philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Ethics

Akrasia (; Greek ἀκρασία, "lacking command" or "weakness", occasionally transliterated as acrasia or Anglicised as acrasy or acracy) is a lack of self-control, or acting against one's better judgment. Beginning with Plato, a variety of philosophers have attempted to determine whether or not akrasia exists and how to best define it.

🔗 Psychology

In psychology, the four stages of competence, or the "conscious competence" learning model, relates to the psychological states involved in the process of progressing from incompetence to competence in a skill. People may have several skills, some unrelated to each other, and each skill will typically be at one of the stages at a given time. Many skills require practice to remain at a high level of competence.

The four stages suggest that individuals are initially unaware of how little they know, or unconscious of their incompetence. As they recognize their incompetence, they consciously acquire a skill, then consciously use it. Eventually, the skill can be utilized without it being consciously thought through: the individual is said to have then acquired unconscious competence.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Psychology

The Flynn effect is the substantial and long-sustained increase in both fluid and crystallized intelligence test scores that were measured in many parts of the world over the 20th century, named after researcher James Flynn (1934–2020). When intelligence quotient (IQ) tests are initially standardized using a sample of test-takers, by convention the average of the test results is set to 100 and their standard deviation is set to 15 or 16 IQ points. When IQ tests are revised, they are again standardized using a new sample of test-takers, usually born more recently than the first; the average result is set to 100. When the new test subjects take the older tests, in almost every case their average scores are significantly above 100.

Test score increases have been continuous and approximately linear from the earliest years of testing to the present. For example, a study published in the year 2009 found that British children's average scores on the Raven's Progressive Matrices test rose by 14 IQ points from 1942 to 2008. Similar gains have been observed in many other countries in which IQ testing has long been widely used, including other Western European countries, as well as Japan and South Korea. Improvements have also been reported for semantic and episodic memory.

There are numerous proposed explanations of the Flynn effect, such as the rise in efficiency of education, along with skepticism concerning its implications. Some researchers have suggested the possibility of a mild reversal in the Flynn effect (i.e., a decline in IQ scores) in developed countries, beginning in the 1990s. In certain cases, this apparent reversal may be due to cultural changes rendering parts of intelligence tests obsolete. Meta-analyses indicate that, overall, the Flynn effect continues, either at the same rate, or at a slower rate in developed countries.

🔗 Psychology 🔗 Linguistics 🔗 History of Science 🔗 Linguistics/Applied Linguistics 🔗 Portugal 🔗 Galicia

Saudade (European Portuguese: [sɐwˈðaðɨ] ; Brazilian Portuguese: [sawˈdadʒi] ; Galician: [sawˈðaðɪ]; Northeast Brazil: [sawˈdadi]). (English: ; plural saudades) in Portuguese and Galician is an emotional state of melancholic or profoundly nostalgic longing for a beloved yet absent someone or something. It derives from the Latin word for solitude. It is often associated with a repressed understanding that one might never encounter the object of longing ever again. It is a recollection of feelings, experiences, places, or events, often elusive, that cause a sense of separation from the exciting, pleasant, or joyous sensations they once caused. Duarte Nunes Leão defines saudade as, "Memory of something with a desire for it". In Brazil, the day of saudade is officially celebrated on 30 January. It is not a widely acknowledged day in Portugal.

🔗 Psychology

An autostereogram is a single-image stereogram (SIS), designed to create the visual illusion of a three-dimensional (3D) scene from a two-dimensional image. In order to perceive 3D shapes in these autostereograms, one must overcome the normally automatic coordination between accommodation (focus) and horizontal vergence (angle of one's eyes). The illusion is one of depth perception and involves stereopsis: depth perception arising from the different perspective each eye has of a three-dimensional scene, called binocular parallax.

The simplest type of autostereogram consists of horizontally repeating patterns (often separate images) and is known as a wallpaper autostereogram. When viewed with proper convergence, the repeating patterns appear to float above or below the background. The well-known Magic Eye books feature another type of autostereogram called a random dot autostereogram. One such autostereogram is illustrated above right. In this type of autostereogram, every pixel in the image is computed from a pattern strip and a depth map. A hidden 3D scene emerges when the image is viewed with the correct convergence.

Autostereograms are similar to normal stereograms except they are viewed without a stereoscope. A stereoscope presents 2D images of the same object from slightly different angles to the left eye and the right eye, allowing us to reconstruct the original object via binocular disparity. When viewed with the proper vergence, an autostereogram does the same, the binocular disparity existing in adjacent parts of the repeating 2D patterns.

There are two ways an autostereogram can be viewed: wall-eyed and cross-eyed. Most autostereograms (including those in this article) are designed to be viewed in only one way, which is usually wall-eyed. Wall-eyed viewing requires that the two eyes adopt a relatively parallel angle, while cross-eyed viewing requires a relatively convergent angle. An image designed for wall-eyed viewing if viewed correctly will appear to pop out of the background, while if viewed cross-eyed it will instead appear as a cut-out behind the background and may be difficult to bring entirely into focus.

🔗 Biology 🔗 Politics 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Neuroscience 🔗 Genetics 🔗 Physiology 🔗 Physiology/neuro 🔗 Evolutionary biology 🔗 Conservatism

A number of studies have found that biology can be linked with political orientation. This means that biology is a possible factor in political orientation but may also mean that the ideology a person identifies with changes a person's ability to perform certain tasks. Many of the studies linking biology to politics remain controversial and unreplicated, although the overall body of evidence is growing.

🔗 Psychology

Cryptomnesia occurs when a forgotten memory returns without its being recognized as such by the subject, who believes it is something new and original. It is a memory bias whereby a person may falsely recall generating a thought, an idea, a tune, a name, or a joke, not deliberately engaging in plagiarism but rather experiencing a memory as if it were a new inspiration.

🔗 Politics 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Marketing & Advertising

Fearmongering, or scaremongering, is the act of exploiting feelings of fear by using exaggerated rumors of impending danger, usually for personal gain.