Formulation of Policy and Strategy in Developing Creativity Education in Four Asian Chinese Societies: A Policy Analysis

The present study sought to compare and contrast educational policies on creativity education in four Asian Chinese societies, namely mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan. It establishes five criteria on creativity education policy, including policies regarding legislation on creativity education, definitions of creativity, standard implementation, explicit identification of special populations of creative students, and creativity education in the community. Among the four societies, Taiwan has an official document — the White Paper on Creative Education published in 2003 — whereas in Hong Kong and Singapore, creativity has been identified as an ability to be nurtured in students of all levels in their national curriculum reform. In mainland China, innovation is regarded as a synonym for creativity. Definitions of creativity have at times not been clearly defined, although multiple levels of creativity development (individual, school, societal, industrial, and cultural) have been discussed in Taiwan. In Hong Kong, creativity has been defined as a generic skill in various key learning areas (e.g., language education, mathematics education, science education, etc.) in the school curriculum. In Singapore, creativity is a learning outcome to be developed in students. None of these societies use standard creativity assessment tests as evidence of creative competence in students. When creativity has entered the central stage in the curriculum reform and creativity education is made available to every student, efforts have been made to identify highly creative students and provide them enrichment opportunities, mainly using performance assessments and performance in creativity competitions in these societies. But mainland China, Hong Kong, and Singapore do not sufficiently emphasize creativity education in the larger community.     

A Wandering Mind is Not Always a Creative Mind: How Thought Dynamics Explain the Relationship between Mind Wandering and Creativity

A wandering mind is not always a creative mind. Anecdotes about ideas spontaneously entering awareness during walks, showers, and other off-task activities are plenty. The science behind it, however, is still inconclusive. Creativity might result from how thought context—whether thoughts are on-task or off-task—relates to thought dynamics—how thoughts unfold. To explore this, study 1 (n = 85) surveyed creative professionals about a single idea they had earlier in the day. The spontaneity of thoughts positively correlated with self-reported creativity, whereas off-task thoughts or doing something else did not. Study 2 (n = 180) replicated these findings in a student sample during an idea generation task and added that free movement of thoughts also correlates with self-reported originality during idea generation. As indicated by expert ratings, no relationship of thought dynamics and thought context was found with population-level creativity. Herewith, this study suggests that thought dynamics, rather than thought context, explain the often suggested relationship between mind wandering and creativity.     

It's My Campaign I'll Cry if I Want to: How and When Campaigns Use Emotional Appeals

Recent research in the area of campaign advertising suggests that emotional appeals can influence political attitudes, electoral choices and decision‐making processes. Yet is there any evidence that candidates use emotional appeals strategically during campaigns? Is there a pattern to their use? For instance, are fear appeals used primarily late in the campaign by trailing candidates in order to get voters to rethink their choices? And are enthusiasm appeals used more commonly early on in order to shore up a candidate's base? We use affective intelligence theory—and supplement it with the idea of a voter backlash—to generate expectations about when candidates use certain emotional appeals (namely, anger, fear, enthusiasm, and pride) and which types of candidates are most likely to do so. We then test these ideas using campaign advertising data from several U.S. Senate races from 2004. Our research thus provides a link between research on campaign decision making—here the decision to “go emotional”—and research focusing on the effects of emotional appeals on voters.     

Creativity in Learning Environments: The Case of Two Sixth Grade Art‐Rooms

The four elements of creativity — the person, process, product, and environment — that come together for the purpose of clearly and completely defining creativity, form the structure of the research. Two sixth grade art‐rooms have been chosen as the setting, as a likely place to observe creativity and sixth graders as the sample group. Observations of each child in an art‐room, her/his creative process, product, and the assessment of a 1/20 model of the art‐room made by each student, were analyzed to form a complete picture of creativity. Results showed that the three elements of creativity (person, process, and product) were significantly different from each other. In addition, process and product occurring within the same environment were highly correlated with each other.     

Survival of the Fittest: Rhetoric During the Course of an Election Campaign

Despite the tradition of studying campaign effects, we know little about the rhetorical strategies of candidates. This study speculates about the types of appeals that incumbents and challengers find most effective and that are, as a result, most likely to dominate an election campaign. Candidates have an incentive to use arguments that evoke emotions such as fear, anxiety, and anger. Emotional appeals allow candidates to emphasize consensual values, which makes it easier to mobilize their party's base while simultaneously attracting the support of the uncommitted. The use of emotional appeals is also consistent with the media's preference for drama and excitement in news reporting. Thus, emotional appeals will be more enduring than other types of appeals, and hence more likely to dominate the rhetorical landscape. A content analysis of newspaper coverage of the 1988 Canadian federal election campaign provides suggestive evidence in favor of this view.     

The Myths of Heaven-Sent Creativity: Toward a Perhaps Less Democratic But More Down-to-Earth Understanding

Creativity is surrounded by a cluster of long-held beliefs—referred to here as myths—which regard it as confined to aesthetic/spiritual domains and as a divine gift to a tiny few, and thus render it ineluctable, ineffable and inscrutable. As a result, treating it as part of normal psychological functioning and emphasizing its usefulness seems almost blasphemous, and is regarded by some as devaluing creative talent or even rendering the idea of creativity meaningless. Indeed, there really does seem to be a danger of commodifying creativity and reducing it to fast food creativity—attractively packaged but lacking genuine nutritional value. However, a phase model of the process of creativity makes it possible to distinguish between sublime creativity, mundane creativity, and commodified creativity without attributing the former to forces beyond mere human existence. This conceptualization has practical consequences for, for instance, education.     

Sixty years of fear appeal research: Current state of the evidence

Fear arousal is widely used in persuasive campaigns and behavioral change interventions. Yet, experimental evidence argues against the use of threatening health information. The authors reviewed the current state of empirical evidence on the effectiveness of fear appeals. Following a brief overview of the use of fear arousal in health education practice and the structure of effective fear appeals according to two main theoretical frameworks—protection motivation theory and the extended parallel process model—the findings of six meta‐analytic studies in the effectiveness of fear appeals are summarized. It is concluded that coping information aimed at increasing perceptions of response effectiveness and especially self‐efficacy is more important in promoting protective action than presenting threatening health information aimed at increasing risk perceptions and fear arousal. Alternative behavior change methods than fear appeals should be considered.     

Discursive Construction of Political Categories and Moral Fields: God Versus Rights and Access in a Reproductive Health Legislative Debate

Using a discursive lens, we argue that politicians rhetorically construct categories, storylines, and moral fields. We further claim that such discursive products are action‐oriented toward gaining popular support in a public sphere that is politically fault lined along similar moral orders. As a case in point, we analyze speeches delivered during congressional voting on a Reproductive Health bill (RH bill). Employing a mixed methods strategy, we first implement a quantitative lexical analysis of frequently used words, followed by a qualitative detection of cohering storylines on both sides of the debate. Results show that oppositionists mark their speeches with a deployment of the word God, while bill supporters use the word access conspicuously. One storyline claims that The RH bill stands against God, while the other purports that The RH bill advocates rights and access. Although both storylines assert moral righteousness, they invoke two different moral orders backed by power blocs and the public at large. The God story appeals to a Catholic discourse and the moral order loudly supported by the politically powerful Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines. The rights/access narrative references a liberal morality frame maintained by social liberals and Philippine President Aquino. We end our paper by introducing the idea of an intrastate discursive lens to analyze moral fields constructed by politicians, oriented toward winning support from the public at large.     

Allegories of the Bioethical: Reading J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year

This essay reads J.M. Coetzee’s novel, Diary of a Bad Year, as an occasion to problematize contemporary bioethical (and neoliberal) paradigms. Coetzee’s rhetorical strategies are analyzed to better understand the “scene of address” within which ethical claims can be voiced. Drawing on Foucault’s Socratic understanding of ethics as the self’s relation to itself, self-relation is explored through the rhetorical figure of catachresis. The essay ultimately argues that the ethical voice emerges when the terms—terms by which I relate to myself, to others, to my own body, and to the bodies of others—are themselves subject to catachrestic refiguration.     

Mood—Creativity Relationship in Groups: The Role of Equality in Idea Contribution in Temporal Mood Effects

As people working in groups might fare better in solving complex problems than those working alone (e.g., Laughlin, Hatch, Silver, & Boh, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90 , 2006 and 644), organizations have increasingly assigned creative projects to groups. Group members contribute their collective efforts over time until the creative project has come to fruition. Although mood is identified as an important antecedent to creativity, little is known about the temporal pattern of how group mood enhances or inhibits group creativity, as well as the underpinning group process that explains the mood—creativity link in groups. We set out to address these questions by taking a within-group approach to study the temporal trends of how group mood precedes group creativity and to examine idea contribution equality (ICE) as a mediating group process. We conducted a three-wave longitudinal study among student workgroups tasked to complete a creativity project over a 1-month span. Evidence showed that positive mood is positively associated with concurrent ICE and negative mood is negatively associated with lagged ICE. Furthermore, a mediation model showed that negative mood eventually hampered expert-rated group creative performance by reducing ICE over time. These findings add new knowledge to the temporal mood—creativity relation within the group context.     

Creativity and genius as epistemic virtues: Kant and early post-Kantians on the teachability of epistemic virtue

There is a classical paradox in education that also affects the epistemic virtues: the paradox inherent in the demand to develop general strategies for training persons to be free and creative individuals. This problem becomes particularly salient with respect to the epistemic virtue of creativity, the more so if we consider a radical form of creativity, namely, genius. This paper explores a historical constellation in which rigorous claims about the standards for knowledge and morality were developed, along with a highly influential notion of genius: the philosophy of Kant and of immediate post-Kantian philosophers. The paper shows how in this historical moment came together a new notion of “science,” a theory of “genius” and of virtues, and an analysis of the promises and difficulties inherent in educating a virtuous or creative individual. In this constellation of ideas, there also emerges a potentially fruitful account of how to teach intellectual creativity.     

Individual and Environmental Influences on Chinese Student Creativity

Primarily using self-report questionnaires and psychometric tests in a sample of 357 Chinese high school students, this study examines how both individual and environmental factors can independently predict student creativity as measured by three different methods, including two product-orientated measures (story completion and collage making), two divergent thinking measures (circle task and picture completion), and one self-report inventory on divergent thinking attitudes. Two different types of theoretical models — the cognitive approach and confluence approach — are compared and contrasted. Based on previous research, this study uses the confluence approach to investigate the influences of individual (i.e. intelligence, personality, motivation, thinking styles, and knowledge) and environmental (i.e., school and family environment) factors on creativity. The results have confirmed the major hypothesis that both individual and environmental factors play decisive roles in Chinese student creativity. Implications of these findings are discussed. This paper also calls for a serious consideration of research on environmental influence on creativity and various mechanisms of this influence.     

How Emotional Are Populists Really? Factors Explaining Emotional Appeals in the Communication of Political Parties

Are populists really more emotional than mainstream parties? The alleged link between populism and emotional communication has barely been subject to systematic empirical scrutiny. I use literature on populist communication and appraisal theory to generate expectations about which political parties use which emotional appeals. I test these claims by applying a novel emotional dictionary to a large set of text data including more than 700,000 press releases and tweets from three European countries. As expected, I find that populist parties use significantly more negative emotional appeals (anger, fear, disgust, sadness) and less positive emotional appeals (joy, enthusiasm, pride, hope) than mainstream parties. Furthermore, I find that political actors adapt the usage of emotional appeals to different purposes depending on the communication medium and the politicians' status level. This study entails important implications for the research on emotional appeals in politics and populist communication.     

Advanced Understanding of Imagination as the Mediator between Five-Factor Model and Creativity

This study examined the mediating role of capability-oriented imagination between personality traits and creativity, by combining two sub-studies. A total of 612 student participants were recruited from universities in Taiwan. Study 1 calibrated the factors of the three variables and validated three instruments of the variables, and the results were consistent with previous studies. The results also indicated that the relationships among the variables of the full five-factor personality traits, capability-oriented imagination, and two-feature creativity were valuable, which prompted further examination. Study 2 adopted structural equation modeling, which not only validated the mediating role of imagination between five-factor personality traits and two-feature creativity but also revealed that various personality traits can improve original or useful creativity through imagination as a mediator. The originality aspect of creativity can be jointly predicted by the variables of initiating and conceiving imagination, with influence (in order, high to low) from openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness. The creativity aspects of usefulness can be jointly predicted by the variables of transforming and conceiving imagination, with influence (in order, high to low) from conscientiousness, openness, and agreeableness. The study also proposes directions for future research.     

The Emergence of Student Creativity in Classroom Settings: A Case Study of Elementary Schools in Korea

This research explores the emergence of student creativity in classroom settings, specifically within two content areas: science and social studies. Fourteen classrooms in three elementary schools in Korea were observed, and the teachers and students were interviewed. The three types of student creativity emerging in the teaching and learning process found in this research were: (a) heuristic creativity when the students express their thoughts about a new concept based on their experience, (b) interpretive creativity when the students explain the meaning of materials based on students' knowledge, and (c) integrative creativity when students generate new solutions or make new products based on their internalized knowledge. The study results will challenge teachers to find instances of student creativity in their teaching and learning situations and to facilitate student creativity when the students interpret data or materials related to the contents of the curriculum.     

Assessing Conversational Cognition Levels of Cognitive Theory and Associated Methodological Requirements

Despite the prominence of cognitively oriented research in interpersonal communication, relatively little is known about the interplay of cognitive and communicative processes during conversation. For interpersonal communication scholars or at least those interested in interaction, the study of cognition is most useful if it reveals how interactants produce, monitor, modify, and process messages while engaged in conversation. The failure to collect data about in-process conversational cognition is partially due to excessive reliance on what have been identified as “implementation level” cognitive theories and models. Such theories are primarily concerned with specifying cognitive “architectures” and provide little guidance about how cognition is adapted to conversational tasks. However, a dearth of methodological creativity is also partially to blame for the lack of data about in-process conversational cognition. On encountering the admittedly formidable methodological difficulties of collecting data about conversational cognition, researchers have tended to rely on traditional but inadequate methods, or worse, have simply ignored theoretical questions pertinent to cognition in-process. This article suggests that claims about cognition can be made at four levels—biological, implementation, algorithmic, and rational—but that theoretical claims about conversational cognition can most usefully be pursued at the rational and algorithmic levels. In an effort to promote more research at these levels, criteria for studying conversational cognition are proposed, and promising methods are reviewed.     

The Ubiquity of Self-Deception

My paper is a discussion of Bas van Fraassen’s important, but neglected, paper on self-deception, “The Peculiar Effects of Love and Desire.” Paradoxes of self-deception are widely thought to follow from the ease with which we know ourselves. For example, if self-deception were intentional, how could we fail to know as target of our own deception just those things necessary to undermine the deception? Van Fraassen stands that reasoning on its head, arguing that is the ease with which we accuse ourselves of self-deception that undermines our confidence in our claims to know ourselves. I unpack and modify his argument, attempting to show that it makes a powerful case for scepticism about self-knowledge. I argue, contra van Fraassen, that local scepticism about self-knowledge threatens our claims to know ourselves in a way that global scepticism does not threaten our claims about the external world. I support this claim by showing that the Wittgensteinian response to the sceptic in On Certainty—that we don’t know what to do with the sceptic’s doubts, that we don’t know how to incorporate those doubts into our practices—does not succeed in deflecting scepticism about self-knowledge because the local sceptic’s doubts—about whether we can distinguish genuine claims to know ourselves from self-deceived claims—are integral to language game of self-knowledge. The local sceptic’s doubts are our doubts because it is natural to ask whether we are deceiving ourselves when we claim to know ourselves. However, because, we have no way of distinguishing genuine claims to know ourselves from self-deceived claims, our claims to self-knowledge are systematically undermined.     

Voice,creativity, and big five personality traits: A meta-analysis

Due to the benefits of voice and creativity on organizations’ effectiveness, scholars have tried to understand the reasons why employees engage in voice and creativity and determine the antecedents of these behaviors, including the role of personality. Previous literature, however, has shown inconsistent results about the effect of personality on voice and creativity. Addressing these inconsistencies, the authors use a meta-analytic approach to examine these relationships and to test potential boundary conditions that might exist in these relationships. This study also seeks to provide empirical support for the previous theoretical claims of similarity between voice and creativity. Clarifying these points, the results of this meta-analysis showed that Openness to Experience, Extraversion, and Conscientiousness are good predictors of creativity and voice. The findings also reveal similar directions and magnitudes of effects sizes in most of the relationships between the Big Five, voice, and creativity, which appears to support the similarities between voice and creativity. The moderation results provide further information about the role of gender differences, the sample type (student/employee sample), and the source of rating (self/other reporting) in these relationships.     

A Confucian Interpretation of Creativity

This article explores a Confucian interpretation of creativity with reference to two classics—Analects and Mencius. A Confucian understanding of creativity centers on yi (appropriateness) and is motivated by shu (empathy) for the purpose of broadening dao (Way). Confucian creativity is manifested in two main ways: novelty through original interpretations of the objective world; and appropriateness through flexible responses to concrete circumstances synchronically and diachronically. Two major implications for research on creativity are highlighted. The first is that a Confucian approach to creativity extends the existing research on personal creativity by foregrounding the moral and interpersonal elements. Secondly, Confucian creativity synthesizes novelty and appropriateness, thereby challenging the essentialization of creativity and creative abilities of East Asians. A Confucian conception of creativity transcends a narrow focus on specific creative acts to a broader consideration of the agents, relationships, socio-cultural contexts and related moral issues.     

Triangulating Creativity: Examining Discrepancies Across Self-Rated,Quasi-Expert-Rated and Verbalized Creativity in Arts-based Learning

This convergent mixed methods study examined the triangulation of self-rated, quasi-expert-rated and verbalized creativity in students enrolled in a year-long photography program. The quantitative data included self-report scales in creativity, and ratings of creativity in students’ photography. The qualitative data included student interviews reflecting on their photographs and verbalizing their beliefs about creativity. The data were first analyzed separately and then merged for analysis to determine possible relationships between these three data sources. Merging quantitative and qualitative data highlighted two key discrepancies between students’ actual creative performance and their perceptions as creative individuals. Possible explanations of these disceprancies are discussed in light of research on creative self-efficacy and creative mindsets.