Creativity and Aesthetic Sense

Aesthetic sense in creativity is much studied in the domain of art. This article focuses on the role of aesthetics in problem finding, problem solving, and verification of creative products in domains outside the arts. The development of aesthetic sense and its implications for creativity education in schools are also discussed.     

Syntactic Creativity Errors in Children's Wh-Questions

Previous work has reported that children creatively make syntactic errors that are ungrammatical in their target language, but are grammatical in another language. One of the most well-known examples is medial wh-question errors in English-speaking children's wh-questions (e.g., What do you think who the cat chased? from Thornton, 1990). The evidence for this non-target-like structure in both production and comprehension has been taken to support the existence of innate, syntactic parameters that define all possible grammatical variation, which serve as a top-down constraint guiding children's language acquisition process. The present study reports new story-based production and comprehension experiments that challenge this interpretation. While we replicated previous observations of medial wh-question errors in children's sentence production (Experiment 1), we saw a reduction in evidence indicating that English-speaking children assign interpretations that conform to the medial wh-question pattern (Experiment 2). Crucially, we found no correlation between production and comprehension errors (Experiment 3). We suggest that these errors are the result of children's immature sentence production mechanisms rather than immature grammatical knowledge.     

Preservice Teachers' Personality Traits and Engagement in Creative Activities as Predictors of Their Support for Children's Creativity

The purpose of this study was to examine relationships among preservice teachers' personality traits, their own engagement in creative activities, and their beliefs about the teaching practices that have been shown to support children's creativity. A total of 302 early childhood and elementary preservice teachers participated in this study. The Ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI), the Creative Behavior Inventory (CBI), and the Creativity-Fostering Teacher Behavior Index (CFTI) were used to measure the preservice teachers' personality traits (Five-Factor Model), creativity-related experiences, and their creativity-fostering teaching practices. A conceptual model was hypothesized, tested, and supported by the results using multiple regression analyses and Sobel mediator tests. Findings indicate that preservice teachers who had higher scores on the openness to experience personality trait had more engagement in creativity-related experiences; those who had higher scores on the openness trait and who had more creativity-related experiences were more likely to espouse creativity-fostering teaching styles; and preservice teachers' own creativity-related experiences fully/partially mediated the relationship between the openness trait and their beliefs about specific creativity-fostering teaching practices. Implications for teacher education are discussed, and suggestions are made for future research on the relationships between teacher attributes and the use of teaching behaviors, which support children's creative development.     

Parents' and Teachers' Implicit Theories of Children's Creativity: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

ABSTRACT: A social validation methodology was applied across two cultures to examine the implicit theories of parents and teachers. Adults (N = 150) from the United States and India were rated on 68 adjectives for creativity and desirability. The results indicated that all groups distinguished between indicative and contraindicative aspects of creativity and, for the most part, viewed creative traits desirably. These results were qualified by the adjectives that received high ratings for creativity but significantly lower ratings for desirability. These provided evidence that creativity and desirability are related yet separate constructs and that parents and teachers recognize that some traits associated with creativity may be undesirable. Multiple analysis of variance (MANOVA) revealed significant differences between the United States and India for intellectual and attitudinal clusters of adjectives, p < .001; however, parent and teacher differences were not found, p > .05. These findings support the notion that implicit theories are influenced by cultural traditions and expectations.     

儿童创造性及其培养方案的研究述评

创造性(Creattivity)也译作创造力,是产生新颖的(如独创的、出乎意料的)和适宜的(如有用的,能随机应变的)工作成果的一种能力(Sternberg等)。有证据表明,早年生活对个人创造潜能的开发尤为重要;为了造就未来的科学家、发明家、艺术家、音乐家、戏剧家、改革家和问题解决专家.科学的培养和提高儿童创造性至关重要。     

Anticipation and Source-Monitoring Errors: Children's Memory for Collaborative Activities

When asked to remember who contributed what to the completion of shared, goal-directed activities, children exhibit a bias to over-attribute contributions to themselves, recoding partners' actions as their own. The goals of the 3 experiments reported here were to explore task characteristics that might influence these recoding processes, and as a result, reveal more about them. The timing of the child's contributions in relation to the partner's actions was found to be crucial for recoding (Experiments 1 and 3). The availability of a model outcome affects recoding as well (Experiment 2), but appears not to be a prerequisite. In the absence of a physical outcome, recoding is still observed (Experiment 3). Anticipation of the partner's actions appears to account for all of these effects. Findings have implications for understanding children's source monitoring abilities as well as for understanding internalization processes thought to support collaborative learning.     

Children's Thoughts on the Origin of Species: A Study of Explanatory Coherence

This paper presents the results of a study which examined children's ideas about speciation. Two groups of elementary school students, 9-year-olds and 12-year-olds, were interviewed using a semi-structured questionnaire. The results indicate that several children explain the phenomena of speciation in terms of consistent explanatory frameworks that strongly resemble either early Greek or renaissance variants of Essentialist theories in biology. The core beliefs of such frameworks constrain the types of solutions that are generated for a variety of biological problems.     

Singaporean Teachers' Perception of Activities Useful for Fostering Creativity

Ninety-five beginning teachers and 116 experienced teachers rated the degree of usefulness of activities for fostering creativity on a 5–Likert scale (1 = not very useful, 5 = very useful). Three clusters (C) were elicited from their responses. C1 was featured by moderate and high ratings of teachers for all the learning activities. C2 was mainly characterized by student-centered independent and collaborative learning activities. C3 was highlighted by student-directed independent learning activities. About two thirds of the experienced teachers and one fifth of the beginning teachers belonged to C1. Nearly half and one fourth of the latter compared to one fifth of the former belonged to C2 and C3, respectively. Implications of the findings for Singaporean education were presented.     

Development of Children's Awareness of Their Own Thoughts

Adults attach special value to objects that link to notable people or events—authentic objects. We examined children's monetary evaluation of authentic objects, focusing on four kinds: celebrity possessions (e.g., Harry Potter's glasses), original creations (e.g., the very first teddy bear), personal possessions (e.g., your grandfather's baseball glove), and merely old items (e.g., an old chair). Children ages 4 to 12 years old and adults (N = 151) were asked how much people would pay for authentic and control objects. Young children consistently placed greater monetary value on celebrity possessions than on original creations, even when adults judged the two kinds of items to be equivalent. These results suggest that contact with a special individual may be the foundation for the value placed on authentic objects.     

整形美容外科实践中若干问题之我见

现代整形美容技术的飞速发展,既给广大有身体缺欠者提供了机会,给整形美容外科的发展和壮大提供了广阔的空间,同时也给整形美容外科工作者提出了很多问题和挑战。对整形美容外科实践进行思考,自觉遵守客观规律,有利于缓解医患关系,减少医疗纠纷的发生,又利于提高整形美容外科的整体服务质量。     

Mapping Creativity: Creativity Measurements Network Analysis

This article borrowed network analysis tools to discover how the construct formed by the set of all measures of creativity configures itself. To this end, using a variant of the meta-analytical method, a database was compiled simulating 42,381 responses to 974 variables centered on 64 creativity measures. Results, although preliminary, indicate the existence of a core dimension filled with variables that indicate novelty, which is surrounded by the paired dimensions of negative affect and social leadership, and high cognitive performance and positive affect. As for the measurement instruments, it was found that, although tests of divergent thinking, self-reported biographies, and composite scores are the most appropriate tools to gauge creativity itself, both attitude and personality inventories are best for diagnosing the different kinds of creators.     

The Notion of Creativity Revisited: A Philosophical Perspective on Creativity Research

This article is a critical, yet constructive, review of some recent attempts to define and understand creativity, informed by the methods and debates of contemporary philosophy. I argue that the definitional project is not essential to creativity research, but important nevertheless. The standard definition of creativity as the production of something that is both novel and appropriate is on the right track, but needs further qualification and tends to be elaborated in ways that make it either too narrow or too broad. I argue that the product, and not the person or process, should be viewed as the primary bearer of creativity and criticize some influential theorists for making creativity too strongly dependent on social acceptance, while also recognizing that the realist alternative tends to widen, and thus threatens to trivialize, the central notion of an appropriate product. The notion of response‐dependence might be of some help to find the proper balance between the two extremes, and some comparisons with evolutionary theory also help to shed further light on the problem. Finally, I try to spell out the practical consequences of my investigation for creativity research.     

Emotional Creativity and Real-Life Involvement in Different Types of Creative Leisure Activities

The role of emotional creativity in practicing creative leisure activities and in the preference of college majors remains unknown. This study aims to explore how emotional creativity measured by the Emotional Creativity Inventory (ECI; Averill, 1999) is interrelated with the real-life involvement in different types of specific creative leisure activities and with four categories of college majors. Data were collected from 251 university students, university graduates, and young adults (156 women and 95 men). Art students and graduates scored significantly higher on the ECI than other majors. Humanities scored significantly higher than technical/economic majors. Five creative leisure activities were significantly correlated with the ECI, specifically, writing, painting, composing music, performing drama, and do-it-yourself home improvement.     

海德格尔美学思想研究述评

近些年来 ,随着海德格尔著作的翻译和思想的评价与研究的逐步深入 ,海德格尔美学思想研究也成为国内海德格尔研究中的一个重要方面。现将国内海德格尔美学思想研究的状况作一概括和简要评述。一、海德格尔美学与传统美学的关系海德格尔美学与传统美学的关系问题 ,是海德格尔美学思想研究中必须涉及和不能回避的基本问题。在这一问题上 ,几乎所有的著述都强调海德格尔美学之于传统美学的反动与超越 ,尽管传统美学的含义在这里显得过于宽泛又缺乏严格界定。但一般来说 ,都不言而喻地在近代经典美学的基本规定与特征的意义上使用“传统美学”这…