The Wise Thinking and Acting Questionnaire: The Cognitive Facet of Wisdom and its Relation with Memory, Affect, and Hope

Wisdom is a topic that holds much promise as geropsychologists turn their attention to the positive facets of aging. This study aimed at (a) examining the construct validity of a new scale for measuring the cognitive facet of wisdom, and (b) analyzing the relations between wisdom and demographic factors, hope, affect, and memory. The participants of the main sample were 446 adults, aged 20–80?years. For the validation of the scale, a second sample (N?=?89) was used; it comprised two subsamples of 37 older adults and 52 young adults. The Wise Thinking and Acting Questionnaire (WITHAQ) was used along with measures of hope, state affect and memory abilities. Ardelt’s 3D-WS was used for validation purposes. A three-factor structure of the WITHAQ with interrelations between the factors was confirmed, reflecting practical wisdom, integrated dialectical thinking, and awareness of life uncertainty, respectively. The relations between the WITHAQ, 3D-WS, and the measure of hope were in the predicted direction. The interaction of age and education predicted the three factors of the WITHAQ positively. Pearson correlations showed that the three factors were differentially associated with affect and memory.     

Motor Creativity and Self-Concept

Creative children often have difficulty in forming their self-concept because parents may suppress their creative ideas. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between motor creativity and self-concept. Wyrick's Motor Creativity Test and the Pictorial Scale of Perceived Competence and Social Acceptance for Young Children were administered to a sample of 414 children aged from 6 ± 0.3 years to 7 ± 0.3 years. Factor analysis for the self-concept measures revealed a 4-factor solution. The amount of variance explained by all 4 factors was 30.28% with the first factor explaining most of the variance (18.2%). Correlation analysis related motor creativity with the self-concept factors, and specifically with the first factor. It seems that perceived maternal acceptance has a significant role in explaining children's motor creativity.     

Working memory as internal attention: Toward an integrative account of internal and external selection processes

Working memory (WM) and attention have been studied as separate cognitive constructs, although it has long been acknowledged that attention plays an important role in controlling the activation, maintenance, and manipulation of representations in WM. WM has, conversely, been thought of as a means of maintaining representations to voluntarily guide perceptual selective attention. It has more recently been observed, however, that the contents of WM can capture visual attention, even when such internally maintained representations are irrelevant, and often disruptive, to the immediate external task. Thus, the precise relationship between WM and attention remains unclear, but it appears that they may bidirectionally impact one another, whether or not internal representations are consistent with the external perceptual goals. This reciprocal relationship seems, further, to be constrained by limited cognitive resources to handle demands in either maintenance or selection. We propose here that the close relationship between WM and attention may be best described as a give-and-take interdependence between attention directed toward either actively maintained internal representations (traditionally considered WM) or external perceptual stimuli (traditionally considered selective attention), underpinned by their shared reliance on a common cognitive resource. Put simply, we argue that WM and attention should no longer be considered as separate systems or concepts, but as competing and influencing one another because they rely on the same limited resource. This framework can offer an explanation for the capture of visual attention by irrelevant WM contents, as well as a straightforward account of the underspecified relationship between WM and attention.     

Differential Correlates of Positive-Based and Negative-Based Incentives in Motivation

We studied the distinction between two contrasting types of positive incentive value, one type based on approaching positive affect (positive-based value or PBV), the other on avoiding negative affect (negative-based value or NBV). Indices of the two types were highly correlated with each other, but structural equations modeling also suggested different patterns of relationships for the two. NBV increased and PBV decreased when goals were perceived as necessary rather than freely chosen. Frequent prior attainment of a goal was associated with reduced PBV but had no clear relation to NBV. Results were qualified by interactions with motivational orientation of raters, but the NBV—PBV contrast may be functional and may overlap with other theoretical distinctions in the literature.     

Religious Discourse and Cyberspace

This article explores the evolution and development of a typology of cyberspatial religious discourse over the course of a few years. The vast quantity of information published on the Net requires the creation of a typology in order to identify and classify the different approaches, attitudes, applications and functions of religion on and in cyberspace. The three different typologies indicate, on the one hand, the versatile character of cyberspace, and on the other hand, the ever-expanding nature of its perimeters. They show that cyberspatial discourse, religious or not, cannot be confined within restricted boundaries but must be perceived as a changeable and unforeseen structure, having the capacity to adapt itself according to the visions, fantasies, ingenuities and inventiveness of the users. They also suggest that despite the rhizomatic construction of cyberspace, the information published on the innumerable religious sites can be systematised in a ‘logical’ formation.     

Perceived responsibility for learning,self-efficacy,and sources of self-efficacy in mathematics: a study of international baccalaureate primary years programme students

The purpose of this study was to assess the interrelationship of elementary students’ perceived responsibility for learning, self-efficacy, and sources of self-efficacy in mathematics, and differentiation as a function of gender and grade level. Participants in this study included 442 third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade students from U.S. International Baccalaureate schools. Self-report measures were used to assess key study variables. Students in grade five reported higher levels of mathematics self-efficacy and perceived responsibility for learning than those in grade three. Grade four students also reported higher levels of perceived responsibility than grade three students. In addition, regression results revealed that mastery experience, vicarious experience, social persuasion, and physiological state accounted for a significant amount of variance in students’ mathematics self-efficacy, with social persuasion being the strongest predictor. Educational implications for practice within the context of International Baccalaureate schools are discussed.     

Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training: A Case Study of a High-Stress Predeployment Military Cohort

Current military deployments have resulted in many psychological and physical health issues and created interest in protective measures to mitigate effects of prolonged and repetitive stress. Mindfulness training has been successfully used for stress reduction in other contexts. The following case report presents a detachment of U.S. Marines who received Mindfulness-Based Mind Fitness Training (MMFT) prior to deployment. Self-report measures of mindfulness, perceptions of stress, predictors of compliance with mindfulness practice, and time spent engaging in practice were indexed. More time spent engaging in practice corresponded with greater self-reported mindfulness; increases in mindfulness were associated with decreases in perceived stress.     

Exploring social capital in rural settlements of an islander region in Greece

This paper reports on a large scale cross‐sectional study examining subjective perceptions of community social life held by a randomly selected sample of residents (n = 428) in all small rural settings (n = 89) of the region of North Aegean Sea. The notion of social capital was used as a conceptual tool in order to explore different aspects of the relational life of contemporary rural communities. This study has two aims: First to provide an account of rural residents' perceptions of village life in terms of interpersonal support, mutual aid, trust, social cohesion and community competence, and second to examine the suitability of the social capital notion within the specific cultural context. A combination of data collection procedures and a range of sources were employed, such as key informants, rural residents and researchers' field observations. The findings indicate that small farming communities of high devotion with deep roots and strong sense of belonging face severe demographic imbalance and experience low civic power given the limited links with external agents. The mainstream notion of social capital as an unconditionally beneficial factor is thus questioned. The findings call for revisiting its relevance across communities with varying capacities and needs. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.