Different Brain Wave Patterns and Cortical Control Abilities in Relation to Different Creative Potentials

Contemporary understanding of brain functions provides a way to probe into the mystery of creativity. However, the prior evidence regarding the relationship between creativity and brain wave patterns reveals inconsistent conclusions. One possible reason might be that the means of selecting creative individuals in the past has varied in each study. By distinguishing creative potential as open-ended versus closed-ended based on theoretical views, this study examined different brain wave patterns and cortical control abilities in relation to different creative potentials by using electroencephalogram (EEG) biofeedback equipment. The results demonstrated that participants’ performance on the open-ended creative problem was positively related to EEG alpha frequencies, whereas performance on the closed-ended creative problem was related to larger variability in EEG dynamics between alpha and beta waves when performing either open-ended or closed-ended creativity tasks. Further, better control in changing states of brain wave activities according to the EEG biofeedback signals could predict closed-ended creativity performance. Open-ended creativity was related only to the enhancement of alpha signals. These results help clarify previous inconsistent findings, reveal different natures of distinct creativities, and further suggest ways to improve different aspects of creativity with modified biofeedback procedures.     

Adolescent Gang Membership and Differences in Ethnic Identity,Esteem, and Efficacy

Scholars have long recognized the impacts of gang membership on adolescents. While some have focused primarily on the negative effects, this seeks to understand the nuanced reasoning and results of joining a gang explicitly on the youth’s perceptions of self-esteem, efficacy, and identity. Using the longitudinal assessment of the Gang Resistance Education and Training (GREAT) program, propensity score matching was conducted on four attitudinal measures to determine whether positive outcomes were seen among adolescents reporting one-time gang involvement. Results indicate a positive effect on self-identity measures. Discussion of these findings illustrates the need for future research and policy implications.     

The Challenger Disaster And The Revival Of Rhetoric In Organizational Life

Explanations of the cause of the Challenger disaster by the Presidential Commission and by communication scholars are flawed. These explanations are characterized by a common tendency to emphasize the technical and procedural aspects of organizational life at the expense of the cognitive and ethical. Rightly construed, the Challenger disaster illustrates both the need for a revived art of rhetoric and the importance of putting in place the political and social conditions that make this art efficacious in furthering cognitive understanding and ethical conduct.     

SEPARATING SPEED FROM AUTOMATICITY IN A PATIENT WITH FOCAL BRAIN ATROPHY

Abstract— Automatic processes are characterized as being rapid, as requiring little attentional effort, and as obligatory (once initialed, the activity cannot be inhibited or controlled). In contrast, controlled processes are slower, require attention, and are non-obligatory. This distinction appears in the Stroop effect the interference that appears when a person tries to name the color of the ink in which a word is printed when the word spells the name of a different color. This effect has historically been attributed to an automatic reading of the color name interfering with the slower, less automatic, naming of the ink color (MacLeod, 1991, Stroop, 1935). In this report, we describe a patient with focal brain atrophy whose speed of reading was no faster than his speed of naming colors, but who still showed the classic Stroop effect. This finding critically challenges the traditional identification of automaticity with processing speed.     

Personal Identity and the Coherence of Q-Memory

Brian Garrett constructs cases satisfying Andy Hamilton's definition of weak q -memory. This does not establish that a peculiar kind of memory is at least conceptually coherent. Any 'apparent memory experiences' that satisfy the definition turn out not to involve remembering anything at all. This conclusion follows if we accept, as both Hamilton and Garrett do, a variety of first-person authority according to which memory judgements may be false, but not on the ground that someone other than the remembering subject had the remembered experience. Garrett's brain-bisection illustration sounds convincing, but only because we retain the idea that the subjects created by implanting a hemisphere each in two different bodies are entitled to say that they remember experiences before the surgery in the ordinary sense. To that extent the illustration presents a case of ordinary memory, not q -memory.     

The Psychological Reality of Reasons

Action explanations like 'I am heading to the ferry because the bridge is closed,' are supposed to require restatement: 'I am . . . because I believe the bridge is closed,' because (i) the objective claim may be false though the intended explanation is correct, and (ii) because objective circumstances have to be cognitively mediated if they are to bear on action. This supposition is rejected here. Restatements cannot withdraw the objective claim without withdrawing the explanation. In the context of reason-giving, belief statements do not function as assertions about the inner life. The fact that belief statements may be true though the belief itself is false creates the illusion of distinctive subject matters. The illusion is exploited by conceptions of belief positing stored representations. Even if there were such representations, retrieved for the sake of expressing previously acquired beliefs, the expression of belief must endorse p and cannot merely advert to the existence and content of a representation. The reverse of the standard philosophical view about restatement is actually correct. Wherever an agent correctly adduces a belief that an objective circumstance obtains in explaining his action, a de-psychologizing restatement that merely makes the objective claim must be ascribable to the agent.     

Expectancy-Based Job Cognitions and Job Affect as Predictors of Organizational Citizenship Behaviors1

This study investigated the importance of expectancy-based job cognitions and job affect (the affective component of job satisfaction) in helping to account for “organizational citizenship behaviors” (OCBs; Organ, 1988). Data pertaining to the expectancy-based job cognitions (i.e., expectancies, instrumentalities, valences), job affect, and OCB performance of 65 state finance agency employees were examined. We anticipated that the effect of expectancy-based job cognitions on OCB would be partially mediated by affect-based job satisfaction. This expectation was confirmed in that, after controlling for negative and positive affectivity, generalized instrumentality beliefs were found to affect OCB-altruism directly, as well as indirectly through the influence of affect-based job satisfaction.