Teachers’ Perceptions of Students’ Creativity in China’s Classrooms: The Role of Students’ Academic Achievement and Misbehaviors

Teachers can be biased, especially toward low achievers and students with behavioral issues. However, creative students often appear to be disruptive in the classroom, and many of them struggle academically. The purpose of the present study was to examine the extent to which teachers’ perceptions of students’ creativity is associated with students’ academic achievement and classroom (mis)behaviors, as well as to examine the interaction between these two factors. Three hundred and fifty‐four eighth‐grade students selected from five middle schools in China participated in this study. Using achievement scores, peer nominations, a divergent thinking test, a self‐rated ideational behavior scale, and teacher ratings, the present study found that, whereas creativity has no significant relationship with teachers’ perceptions, academic achievements and misbehavior are significantly associated within structors’ perceptions. The achievement bias resulted in the underestimation of low achievers’ creativity, even when the low achievers were highly creative. More nuances emerged when student misbehaviors were considered. Specifically, misbehaving low achievers’ originality was further underestimated even when they were highly original. In contrast, teachers overestimated well‐behaved high achievers’ creativity, even when the students comprised the lowest creativity group. The results are further discussed from a socio‐cultural perspective.     

Seeing,mirroring, desiring: The impact of the analyst’s pregnant body on the patient’s body image

The paper explores the impact of the analyst’s pregnant body on the course of two analyses, a young man, and a young woman, specifically focusing on how each patient’s visual perception and affective experience of being with the analyst’s pregnant body affected their own body image and subjective experience of their body. The pre‐verbal or ‘subsymbolic’ material evoked in the analyses contributed to a greater understanding of the patients’ developmental experiences in infancy and adolescence, which had resulted in both carrying a profoundly distorted body image into adulthood. The analyst’s pregnancy offered a therapeutic window in which a shift in the patient’s body image could be initiated. Clinical material is presented in detail with reference to the psychoanalytic literature on the pregnant analyst, and that of the development of the body image, particularly focusing on the role of visual communication and the face. The author proposes a theory of psychic change, drawing on Bucci’s multiple code theory, in which the patients’ unconscious or ‘subsymbolic’ awareness of her pregnancy, which were manifest in their bodily responses, feeling states and dreams, as well as in the analyst s countertransference, could gradually be verbalized and understood within the transference. Thus visual perception, or ‘external seeing’, could gradually become ‘internal seeing’, or insight into unconscious phantasies, leading to a shift in the patients internal object world towards a less persecutory state and more realistic appraisal of their body image.     

Asperger’s and musical creativity: The case of Erik Satie

The link between psychopathology and creativity was investigated in the study of one individual: the French composer Erik Satie. The current literature puts much emphasis on the connection between creativity and the psychoses – such as schizophrenia and the affective disorders – but there is relatively little concerning other psychological disorders. Nevertheless, there has been a recent upswing in the study of autism and associated disorders (such as Asperger’s syndrome), and their association with creativity. The literature reviewed here included a number of biographies, books about the autism spectrum disorders, and articles detailing the psychopathology-creativity link. The aim was not to diagnose Satie with a psychological disorder, but to illustrate that he, who was highly creative, innovative and influential in the development of 20th century music, displayed many of the personality traits typical of Asperger’s syndrome. These include perfectionism, perseverance, hatred of conventions, and heightened sensitivity; these combined enabled Satie to devise his own original musical idiom. This case study alone does not – and was not intended to – answer the overall question regarding the existence of a psychopathology-creativity link; but it does support the idea in the context of current literature.     

Children’s solutions of logical versus empirical problems: What’s missing and what develops?

This research examined the development of the ability to differentiate logical from empirical problems and the different ways in which children solve these problems. Thirty-two 4- and 5-year-olds, thirty-four 8- and 9-year-olds, and thirty-five 11- and 12-year-olds were given five questions regarding an imaginary character’s predictions as to where a ball would land after being dropped through a ‘tautology machine’. The questions examined encoding and recall of problems, children’s understanding of when evidence was necessary, and children’s evaluation of form and evidence. Data were analyzed in two ways: (1) by comparing differences across participants on component questions and (2) an individual analysis examining the consistency of responses to component questions across the problem set. Overall, the results indicated that: (1) sixth graders tended to differentiate logical from empirical problems while preschool and third grade children rarely did; (2) young children tend to ignore both the logical connective and the second half of problems-termed a ‘cut;’ (3) these cuts are less frequent when a problem is compatible with one empirical possibility; (4) cuts do not stem from encoding or recall errors, but seem to be the product of incomplete problem processing and (5) from third to sixth grade, children’s understanding of logical form increased as the rate of cuts decreased.     

‘Caesura’ as Bion’s discourse on method1

The author contends that Caesura, one of Bion’s last works, can be read as the equivalent of Descartes’s Discourse on Method. In this compact and complex text, the dictate of ‘methodical’ and ‘hyperbolic doubt’– so called because it is taken to the extreme form of application to the faculty of thought itself – which, for Descartes, represents the fundamental principle of philosophical and scientific research, is reflected in the formula of ‘transcending the caesura’. Bion directs his attention successively to the pairs of opposing concepts that structure psychoanalytic discourse and demonstrates their paradoxical and non‐separative logic. The binary system of producing meaning is deconstructed through the systematic use of non‐pathological – i.e. not static but dynamic – reversible perspective. A viewpoint that appears natural, self‐evident and primary is plunged into crisis and proves to be founded on what the punctuation mark of the slash excludes. Yet the new point of view does not supplant its predecessor, but supplements it. The conceptual opposition is not overturned, but merely destabilized in such a way as to maintain a creative tension that generates new thoughts. By this technique of wrong‐footing the reader, Bion achieves what is tantamount to a Kuhnian revolution: the transition from Freud’s semiotic or evidential paradigm to an aesthetic one, centred on emotional experience – to a ‘science of at‐one‐ment’. Working with the antithetical concepts of censorship and caesura, the author illustrates some clinical implications of this radical shift.