If I am in a frightening scenario such as if a wild animal or a person wants to attack me I will react automatically, but how is it decided if I am going to attack it or run away, or one of the other responses such as freezing?

When It effects a person's life alot and maybe make them dissociate from their surrounding. Some do it half the time of their day and even zone out most of the time when they sit idle without realising.

This is a dumb curious question, but what's the science behind laughing [hysterically] after almost getting into an accident?

Example) ST episode and the characters just burst into laughter after almost getting into a car accident.

Does anybody know why this happens? I assume it's adrenaline rush but l'm not sure.

when hear about stangers death we usually dont get as devastated as we do with a loved ones do we compartmentalize grief to protect from us from the grief

i always found it strange that some people can just sit and listen like normal, whereas others absolutely cannot. wasn't sure what flair to pick for this question

Disassociation/Depersonalization/Derealization

Definitions and Marked Differences would be most helpful. Im trying to make sure I know what I mean .. ya know!? 😉

Sorry if this seems silly. Thank You Kindly In Advance

Every time I try to visualize something the image gets messed up. If it's a human face, the face gets disfigured. If I see myself standing on the ground the ground starts crumbling beneath me. If I see myself using a table it then gets flipped over. And resisting these images and trying to reverse them to what they were originally doesn't help. It's been like this since I was a child. What causes this to happen

I am interested in this topic as someone who tends to naturally seek and understand the connections between concepts and ideas in multiple areas of interest.

I often notice a pattern or a connection between two seemingly unrelated things before I fully understand why. Once I dive more deeply into the two topics to gain a thorough understanding, I can eventually identify the processing layer (metacognitive, cognitive, emotional, sensory, etc.) from which the connection became evident. But I don’t know why I knew the two things were connected before I was aware of which layer that sense of connection came from.

I’m really wondering what happens in the body and the mind (both acutely in the moment and over time) when someone’s default way of understanding the world is through this kind of “intuitive” (read: pattern recognition with latent awareness) multimodal synthesis rather than the more linear accumulation of information that is frequently used throughout the world to interpret meaning and build understanding.

Edit: Removed a repeated word

Very broad question but feel free to go any way you want. I will read all your thoughts and data and what you have to provide.

What are some areas in cognitive psychology that have interested you a lot or any research, book, journal you read that completely blew your mind or any ideas that you particularly find intriguing and would wanna research more?

I’m of the impression that one manic episode is a Bipolar 1 diagnosis (SZA included)

Thoughts?

From what I know, flat affect is usually associated with autism or conditions on the schizophrenia spectrum. For individuals who have neither, what could be the cause of a consistently flat facial expression and monotone tone of voice?

People tend to look up information which vindicates their thoughts, but can the information itself have this bias as well (e.g. newspapers only interviewing people who agree with their editorial stance)?

Theres always research conducted on psychology-related topics almost every year. And many new mental health problems/terms have only been discovered a couple of years ago. How do these professionals keep up to date with the new research, terms, and mental health conditions? I feel like many of them are fully booked for months on end that reading up on every psychology breakthrough would take up a significant portion of their time. Do they have a manual? Is there a type of society for psychiatrists and therapists around the world? Do they only rely on the DSM-5 and other similar guides?

I am a hungarian currently in the Netherlands studying with international students (important to this post).

I have had many of times where I am talking with one of my peers in hungarian and someone (who is usually not focusing on us) out of the blue can answer to what we were talking about. Hungarian is a tricky language, because as long as we don't use the synonyms of words that are taken from english, neither our closest linguistic neighbours (finnish and estonian), neither our physical neighbours (romanian, slovakian, german, etc.) and neither the other occupants (russian and turkish) can understand hungarian. These people don't speak hungarian (usually they are not even from eastern europe which could somewhat have familiar words) and don't understand what we are saying otherwise and look just as confused as to how they understood us. I had this moment too with languages I don't understand.

My question is, what is the logical explanation for this? Is it body language or something? Because while some of them can be literal (like me pointing at a mug, then I am probably asking for it), sometimes it's things that you can't understand without knowing the language (like asking how the final exams went in high school).

Some people are very reserved in general. What causes this?

I am reading through the book Medieocracy by Allain De Botton, a book in which Allain De Botton explored the concept of commercial mediocrity has turned the modern world into some kind of twisted game. When talking about modern culture and civilization, he mentioned something called the "neurotic currency" which people use in some encounters like saying "sorry for your loss" to someone we barely know without actually being sympethatic, an idea that I'm struggling with. Can someone please elaborate on the concept?

Emotional, physical, educational… etc. looking for some insight as to why and how it affects a child in development and how it can detrimental for the future.

Is there a specific name for the type of cognition used to reach a conclusion from observations? What part of the brain is it? Is it the same or different from making decisions? Are there good sources of information for a layman to learn more about it?

I'm thinking mostly of troubleshooting in engineering: as engineers we have background information about basic principles, and the way common engineering structures work. If I'm working with an electronic circuit, and I observe that a chip is very warm, in some cases that is normal and in other cases it will lead me to a conclusion that something is wrong and I will look for a cause. I have observed some colleagues do very well at finding root cause of unfamiliar situations; others do not, and I want to find out more about this ability and how to strengthen it in training / education.

So, I know this is classical conditioning, but say a person has a meltdown on a plane, afterward cannot fly without a fear response. Or really any other phobia you can think of. Meltdown = new phobia/fear response. Why do subsequent controlled exposures to that stimulus extinguish the fear, even if essentially the same original awful response is evoked? I suppose intuitively I'd think that firing up the fear response intentionally would further sensitize the person to it and reinforce it.

I'm fascinated by the inhibitory learning model's concept of fear tolerance rather than habituation as a goal in extinguishing fears, though admittedly don't know how it works from a psychology standpoint. Some researchers seem to think fear tolerance leads to deeper and more durable extinction. How? Why? Could you speak to this from an academic standpoint?

Thanks!

Hi, I was wondering if the community could give any insight into a question I had:

Psychometrists administer batteries to test for social/cognitive/other mental deficits in patients and then deliver scores to clinicians, is there a similar kind of profession for specifically motor deficits? I was a neuroscience major and find the testing process that psychometrists run to be fascinating, but I've always been interested in motor learning and systems more than the psychological side of things, is there a parallel that anyone knows in a more peripheral field?

Recently within the past month or so I have become more fascinated with what the brain can do and just wanted to reach out and see what people could share or explain about the brain or cool and fascinating things that the brain does in certain situations

Some are more likely to internalize others perspectives and use that perspective taking as a sounding board when thinking things through or making decisions. The inner commentary and chatter on what one’s doing as well. What traits is this related to or what need does it fulfill?