Concepts of Creativity: Similarities and Differences among Mainland,Hong Kong and Taiwanese Chinese

Aspects of creativity concepts across different Chinese populations were examined. A Likert style questionnaire consisting of 60 adjectives was administered to 451 undergraduates from Beijing, Guangzhou, Taipei and Hong Kong. The results show that: (a) the core characteristics of creativity identical in all the samples are: “originality”, “innovativeness”, “thinking” and “observational skills”, “flexibility”, “willingness to try”, “self confidence”, and “imagination”; (b) the Taipei sample, unlike the other three samples, does not associate “wisdom”, “assertiveness”, and “individualism” with creativity; (c) in all Chinese populations the three factors labeled innovative, dynamic, and intellectual were distinguishable in the concept of creativity; (d) “artistic” and “humorous” were missing in the Chinese perception of creativity; (e) creativity characteristics received relatively low ratings on the desirability scale.     

Response to Ranganathan

This essay responds to Bharat Ranganathan's “Comment” on my essay, “The Concept of Dignity in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (2011). Addressing key criticisms in this “Comment,” I make the following points. First, neither the idea of inherent dignity being “imparted” to humans, nor the Universal Declaration's implication—through its use of terms such as “inherent” and “inalienable”—that humans participate in transcendent reality, necessarily presuppose a Christian metaphysics. Second, a concept such as “inherent dignity” must be affirmed to be intrinsically heuristic unless we are to assume that its meaning can be completely known within the conditions of existence; but this affirmation does not render such concepts “indeterminate of sense.” Finally, Ranganathan's distinction between“weak” and “strong” senses of transcendence is untenable. If human truths beyond all contingencies are knowable (“weak” transcendence), then there must be a real dimension of meaning that transcends all contingencies (“strong” transcendence).     

Priming effect in affirmative complex conditional connectives

We report the results of an experiment that examined the mental representations underlying the comprehension of complex conditional connectives (such as “A, on condition that B”) and the conditional if (such as “A, if B”). The mental representations during the comprehension stage were analysed using a “priming methodology”. The experiment showed that participants read the possibility “A and not-B” faster when it was primed by “A, if B” than when it was primed by “A, on condition that B”. The finding suggests that people understand the sentence “A, on condition that B” as biconditional; other possibilities (“A and B”, “not-A and B”, “not-A and not-B”) were primed equally by both connectives. We discuss the implications of this for current theories of reasoning.     

Los efectos de la clarificación de la regla y de los factores atencionales sobre la tarea de selección de Wason

Resumen

Se han propuesto muchas explicaciones para dar cuenta de la dificultad que entraña la tarea de selección de Wason, especialmente en su versión abstracta (si “A” entonces “7”). Los sujetos tienen dificultades para acceder a las representación es alternativas necesarias para resolver la tarea. Nuestro objetivo es facilitar el acceso a las representaciones implícitas. Con este fin manipulamos (1) el efecto de la clarificación de la regla (si “A” entonces “7” no supone si “7” entonces “A”) con el objetivo bloquear la interpretación bicondicional y (2) el efecto de forzar a los participantes a pensar sobre la relevancia de la tarjeta “no q” o sobre la irrelevancia de la tarjeta “q”. El experimento 1 se diseñó para analizar el efecto de los factores atencionales (factor 2). Quienes recibieron la ayuda 2 aumentaron su porcentaje de selecciones de “no q” cuando eran centrados en esta tarjeta, y disminuyeron el porcentaje de elección de la tarjeta “q” cuando eran focalizados en esta tarjeta; aunque no aumentó el porcentaje de selección de las tarjetas “p” y “no q”. Sin embargo en el experimento 2, los participantes que recibieron ambas ayudas (1 y 2, en este caso focalización en “no q”) aumentaron el porcentaje de selecciones “p” y “no q” hasta llegar al 64.81%. La mejora no se produjo con la ayuda 1, esto es, el bloqueo del bicondicional.     

“A GREATEST MIRACLE”: STANLEY CAVELL,MORAL PERFECTIONISM,AND THE ASCENT INTO THE ORDINARY

What to make of “the ordinary,”“the everyday,” and their common “eventfulness”? What to think of what Veena Das, in her recent book Life and Words, prefaced by Stanley Cavell, has called our need to “descent into the ordinary”? Is there a parallel figure of “ascent,” again, into the same “ordinary,” that we might we want to juxtapose with it and that resembles the motif of “change,” even “conversion,” that Cavell analyzes at some length in The Claim of Reason and throughout his oeuvre as a whole? And what could be our reasons for doing so? This essay will draw on Cavell's reading of Ibsen's work in the volume Cities of Words to spell out what such an “ascent” might mean.     

Right and Righteous: Children's Incipient Understanding and Evaluation of True and False Statements

Two studies examined young children's early understanding and evaluation of truth telling and lying and the role that factuality plays in their judgments. Study 1 (one hundred four 2- to 5-year-olds) found that even the youngest children reliably accepted true statements and rejected false statements and that older children's ability to label true and false (T/F) statements as “truth” and “lie” emerged in tandem with their positive evaluation of true statements and “truth” and their negative evaluation of false statements and “lie.” The findings suggest that children's early preference for factuality develops into a conception of “truth” and “lie” that is linked both to factuality and moral evaluation. Study 2 (one hundred twenty-eight 3- to 5-year-olds) revealed that whereas young children exhibited good understanding of the association of T/F statements with “truth,” “lie,” “mistake,” “right,” and “wrong,” they showed little awareness of assumptions about speaker knowledge underlying “lie” and “mistake.” The results further support the primacy of factuality in children's early understanding and evaluation of truth and lies.     

The categorical interpretation of Guo Xiang’s “independent genesis”

Seemingly, “independent genesis” refers to the independent existence and changes of each thing, but it is clear that there cannot be any truly “independent” things at all. Each thing in the world has to stay in connection or relationship with other things outside itself if it wants to represent its own “independence” and “genesis” in terms of form; and inevitably such connection or relationship itself has to be embodied in the internal nature of each thing. In the metaphysical thought of Guo Xiang, the former was known as the quality of “interdependence”; and the latter the characteristics of “quality” or “quality image.” Such characteristics of “quality” or “quality image” were interdependent, which constituted the essence of each thing itself as “beingness” and “beinglessness,” and thus resulted in the independent manifestation and change of things in terms of their external forms. The grasping of essence of things as “beingness” and “beinglessness” depended upon comprehension or rational intuition, and that was the realm of “profundity” in Guo Xiang’s terms.     

Therapeutic popularity and personality: Association between peer therapist nominations and the “Big Five” personality factors

The “Big Five” personality factors of three groups of psychology students differing in popularity as therapist among their peers were compared (n=33). In agreement with earlier research, popular therapists are “agreeable”, “conscientious” and “stable”. However, popular therapists are not “surgent/extravert” and especially not “dominant” and “talkative”. No support was found for the hypothesis that similarity in “agreeableness” or dissimilarity in “surgency” (the complementarily hypothesis derived from interpersonal theory) predicts therapist popularity. However, similarity between client and therapist in “stability” was predictive of nominations for therapist. On the assumption that therapist popularity predisposes good therapeutic alliances, the results indicate that therapists agreeableness, conscientiousness and emotional stability are relative to success in therapeutic interventions.     

Towards a literary account of mental health from James' Principles of Psychology

The field of mental health tends to treat its literary metaphors as literal realities with the concomitant loss of vague “feelings of tendency” in “unusual experiences”. I develop this argument through the prism of William James’ (1890) “The Principles of Psychology”. In the first part of the paper, I reflect upon the relevance of James' “The Psychologist's Fallacy” to a literary account of mental health. In the second part of the paper, I develop the argument that “connotations” and “feelings of tendency” are central to resolving some of the more difficult challenges of this fallacy. I proceed to do this in James' spirit of generating imaginative metaphors to understand experience. Curiously, however, mental health presents a strange paradox in William James’ (1890) Principles of Psychology. He constructs an elaborate conception of the “empirical self” and “stream of thought” but chooses not to use these to understand unusual experiences – largely relying instead on the concept of a “secondary self.” In this article, I attempt to make more use of James' central division between the “stream of thought” and the “empirical self” to understand unusual experiences. I suggest that they can be usefully understood using the loose metaphor of a “binary star” where the “secondary self” can be seen as an “accretion disk” around one of the stars. Understood as literary rather the literal, this metaphor is quite different to more unitary models of self-breakdown in mental health, particularly in its separation of “self” from “the stream of thought” and I suggest it has the potential to start a re-imagination of the academic discourse around mental health.     

Home Brewed Alcohol use Among High School Students in a Rural South African Community

This study investigates the use of home brewed alcoholic beverages among adolescents in high schools in a rural community in South Africa. There is much concern about alcohol misuse among young people and very little information exists on alcohol produced by the informal liquor industry in South Africa. A total of 1600 high school students participated in the study. The prevalence rates for past year use of home brewed alcohol was 22.2%. There was association between home brewed alcohol use and correlates such as “lived in city”; “raised by both parents”; “repeating school year”; “poor scholastic progress”; “absenteeism” “getting into trouble”, “arguing with parents/friends”; “neglecting homework”; and “recreation/leisure”. The prevalence rates for home brewed alcoholic beverages use in this rural schools calls for more research that focuses on home brews which could lead to the development of appropriate health promotion intervention in schools.     

Children's understanding of sentences with contingent relations: Why are temporal and conditional connectives so difficult?

Children aged 5-, 7-, and 9 were tested on two different tasks to assess their understanding of sentences containing the connectives “when,” “as soon as,” “before,” “after,” “if,” “if-not,” “unless,” and “unless-not.” The results revealed significant improvement between the ages of 5 and 7. This improvement was attributed, in part, to an increased ability to retain information expressed in subordinate clauses. At all age levels, however, the connectives “unless” and “unless-not” were consistently misinterpreted; “unless” was treated as its polar opposite “if,” and “unless-not” was treated as its polar opposite “if-not.”     

THE ENCHANTMENTS OF MAMMON: NOTES TOWARD A THEOLOGICAL HISTORY OF CAPITALISM

Tales of “disenchantment” dominate modern intellectual life, and especially accounts of the cultural history of capitalism. Yet Weberian sociology, and especially Marxist notions of “commodity fetishism”, point to the persistence of “enchantment” in the capitalist imagination. If we reformulate these notions of “enchantment” and “disenchantment” in theological terms of sacrament, then we can write new histories of capitalism, as well as articulate new forms of political and cultural criticism. Borrowing from “radical orthodoxy”, the author takes a Cook's Tour of “disenchantment”, explores the possibilities afforded by “sacramental” conceptions of materialism, and gestures toward an account of American cultural history shaped by a sacramental materialism.     

Sistemas de creencias ambientales: un análisis multi-muestra de estructuras factoriales

Resumen

Se estudiaron las respuestas que dieron 174 estudiantes universitarios de Sonora, México y 221 de Tenerife, España, a un cuestionario de creencias ambientales. Las respuestas al cuestionario fueron agrupadas en tres factores: “Antropocentrismo”, “Progreso humano” y “Naturalismo”, los cuales fueron confirmados a través de un análisis factorial. Un análisis multi-muestra de covarianza reveló que la estructura factorial en las dos poblaciones era equivalente, es decir, la composición de los tres factores fue semejante en mexicanos y españoles. Se presentaron sin embargo, algunas diferencias al correlacionar los factores. Aunque la correlación entre “antropocentrismo” y “progreso” fue alta y positiva para ambas muestras, y la covarianza entre “antropocentrismo” y “naturalismo” fue muy alta y negativa en los españoles y no tan alta, pero tambien negativa en los mexicanos, la correlación entre “progreso” y “naturalismo” fue negativa en la muestra de Tenerife, pero no fue significativa entre los sonorenses. Se discuten estos hallazgos en términos de visiones “dualistas” y “holistas” que diferentes sociedades americanas y europeas plantean en su relación con el medio ambiente.     

Construction et validation d’un inventaire du soutien dans le contexte de l’arrêt tabagique (ISAT) destiné au fumeur et à son proche

Smoking cessation is a difficult process, often requiring the support of others. Nonetheless, there are no specific inventories assessing this support. This study was carried out on 112 smoker/helper dyads with the aim of reaching internal validation of a “Support Inventory in the context of Smoking Cessation”. The SISC consists of three questionnaires: two intended for the smoker to assess the “received” and “desired” support; the third intended for the helper to assess the “given” support. Each questionnaire includes items assessing three principal types of support: “emotional”, “informational” and “motivational”. The results of factorial analysis confirm the internal validity of the three SISC questionnaires. Each of the three questionnaires consists of 11 items which estimates the “emotional”, “informational” and “motivational” dimensions of support. The three questionnaires and their factors possess a very good internal coherence. Their utility in both clinical applications and the field of research should be tested.     

Reaction times in a task analogous to “same”-“different” judgment

Subjects responded “yes” if two equal-length strings of letters contained a common letter in a common position; otherwise they responded “no.” Thus, the task was to judge whether all or not all of the letters in one string differed from the letter occupying the corresponding position in the other string. Conversely, in “same”-“different” judgment, the task is to judge whether all or not all of the letters in one string match the corresponding letter in the other string. Thus, common-letter judgment and “same”-“different” judgment are symmetrically related with “no” analogous to “same” and “yes” analogous to “different.” The response “same” is often faster than the response “different.” However, in the common-letter task, “no” was slower than “yes.” More specifically, both the “yes” and “no” reaction times were consistent with a serial self-terminating search. This is precisely what would be expected from Bamber’s (1969) two-process model.     

Coping strategies used by middle-aged males with noise-induced hearing loss,with and without tinnitus

Abstract

The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between general coping strategies and specific communication strategies, adopted by males with noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) in order to deal with stressful events and demanding auditory situations. The sample included 72 males with NIHL; 22 without tinnitus, 26 with mild tinnitus, and 24 with severe tinnitus. The following variables were measured: “active coping” “escape coping” and “passive acceptance” (general coping strategies), and “maladaptive behaviours”, “verbal strategies” and “nonverbal strategies” (specific communication strategies). The results showed that males without tinnitus or with mild tinnitus combined “active coping” and “passive acceptance”, whereas males with severe tinnitus supplemented these strategies with “escape coping”. The relationship between general coping and specific communication strategies was weak, although giving a significant correlation between “escape coping” and “maladaptive behaviours”. The results indicate that the hypothesis that a person's general pattern of coping has influence on his/her ability to cope effectively with a hearing impairment can not be supported. Further research should concentrate on the contribution of personality factors as well as environmental factors to the variance in coping with NIHL and tinnitus.     

Is Colour incompatibility analytic?

It is widely believed that some a priori necessary truths are not analytic in the sense of transformable by substitution of synonyms into logical truths. One much-cited example comes from the supposed incompatibility between colour predicates. The idea is that sentences like “Nothing is both blue all over (or uniformly or at a point) and also red” are not transformable into a logical truth in the same way as “Nothing is both a bachelor and married” because the requisite conceptual link between “bachelor” and “not married” is absent between “blue” and “not red”. This paper examines whether colour exclusion may be more like the bachelor case than it initially appears. It transpires that the most promising line of thought is not, however, as has been argued at length in the literature, that “blue” in some more or less convoluted way manages to mean “not red”. Instead it is suggested that the requisite conceptual link may reside in the oft-ignored qualifications (“all over”, “uniformly”, etc.), without which there is no incompatibility in the first place.     

A Narrative Search for Respect

This article examines narratives of the self used by stigmatized people searching for respect on the streets of Oslo, Norway. The three narratives—“it was my own choice,” “I'm decent,” and “we're the same”—are embedded in conventional discourse. They are utilized in claims to be morally decent selves. Three different narratives—“I'm interesting,” “I'm smart,” and “I'm dangerous”—are embedded in the gangster discourse of a violent street subculture. They are utilized in order to appear as fascinating and competent. This ambivalent presentation of self challenges concepts such as “the code of the street” and “street culture.”     

On modeling the creativity and the concept of Chef-D’oeuvre

The problem of modeling the creativity is shown to be entirely connected with another mysterious challenge — the “Explanatory Gap” between the concepts of “Brain” and “Mind”. We use the Natural Constructive Cognitive Architecture, with its important feature being the combination of two subsystems, for generation of new information and for its conservation. “Brain” is considered as records of the raw images of real objects (individual objective information), while “Mind” refers to individual subjective information created inside the cognitive system (symbols). We argued that creativity can be treated as “an effort to bring a piece of personal “Brain” into the “Mind” and World”. Specific thinking mode (intellectual panic or throes of creativity) is shown to enhance the creative work resulting in over-mobilization and even enriching personal deep inside (“Brain”) experience. It is simulated by chaotic jumps of the noise amplitude around abnormally high value. The nature of Aesthetic Emotions and the concept of Chef-D’oeuvre are analyzed. It is shown that they are caused by the “recognition paradox”: an object seems both, familiar but unusual. This occurs if the “Brain” does see its subtle features, while the “Mind” does not realize. Bright aesthetic emotions (goosebumps) are caused by irregular excitation of implicit associations provided by weak (“gray”) connections of the halo neurons (simulating the subconsciousness). General formula for Chef-D’oeuvre in science and art could be expressed as “condensed capacity to see the invisible, to combine the incompatible”.     

Sadomasochism as Make‐Believe

In “Rethinking Sadomasochism,” Patrick Hopkins challenges the “radical” feminist claim that sadomasochism is incompatible with feminism. He does so by appeal to the notion of “simulation.” I argue that Hopkins's conclusions are generally right, but they cannot be inferred from his “simulation” argument. I replace Hopkins's “simulation” with Kendall Walton's more sophisticated theory of “make‐believe.” I use this theory to better argue that privately conducted sadomasochism is compatible with feminism.