Mathematical Intelligence and Mathematical Creativity: A Causal Relationship

This study investigated the causal relationship between mathematical creativity and mathematical intelligence. Four hundred thirty-nine 8th-grade students, age ranged from 11 to 14 years, were included in the sample of this study by random cluster technique on which mathematical creativity and Hindi adaptation of mathematical intelligence test were administered with 4-month time lag. Cross-lagged panel analysis was used to analyze the data. The uncorrected cross-lagged correlations appeared to show no causal relation between mathematical creativity and mathematical intelligence. But after the correction the difference in the cross-lagged correlations was found to be small and does not give guarantee of unidirectional causal relation between these two constructs. It revealed that there is a mutually reinforcing (symmetric) relationship between mathematical intelligence and mathematical creativity, i.e., mathematical intelligence causes mathematical creativity and vice-versa.     

Culture and the role of choice in agency

Three cross-cultural studies conducted among U.S. and Indian adults compared perceptions of helping friends in strongly versus weakly expected cases, views of helping family versus strangers, and responses to a self-determination motivation scale. Expectations to help family and friends were positively correlated with satisfaction and choice only among Indians and not among Americans. Also, whereas U.S. respondents associated lesser satisfaction and choice with strongly versus weakly socially expected helping, Indian respondents associated equal satisfaction and choice with the 2 types of cases. Providing evidence of the importance of choice in collectivist cultures, the results indicate that social expectations to meet the needs of family and friends tend to be more fully internalized among Indians than among Americans. Methodologically, the results also highlight the need to incorporate items that tap more internalized meanings of role-related social expectations on measures of motivation in the tradition of self-determination theory.     

Beliefs about emotional residue: the idea that emotions leave a trace in the physical environment

Drawing upon the literatures on beliefs about magical contagion and property transmission, we examined people's belief in a novel mechanism of human-to-human contagion, emotional residue. This is the lay belief that people's emotions leave traces in the physical environment, which can later influence others or be sensed by others. Studies 1-4 demonstrated that Indians are more likely than Americans to endorse a lay theory of emotions as substances that move in and out of the body, and to claim that they can sense emotional residue. However, when the belief in emotional residue is measured implicitly, both Indians and American believe to a similar extent that emotional residue influences the moods and behaviors of those who come into contact with it (Studies 5-7). Both Indians and Americans also believe that closer relationships and a larger number of people yield more detectable residue (Study 8). Finally, Study 9 demonstrated that beliefs about emotional residue can influence people's behaviors. Together, these finding suggest that emotional residue is likely to be an intuitive concept, one that people in different cultures acquire even without explicit instruction.     

Screening for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in adult inpatients with psychiatric disorders

The purpose was to assess the effectiveness of the adult ADHD Module from the MINI International Neuropsychiatric Interview (MINI) and the Conners' Adult ADHD Rating Scales: Screening Version DSM-IV ADHD Symptoms Total Scale (CAARS-S:SV) in screening for attention-deficit/hyperactivity (ADHD) disorder in patients hospitalized for other psychiatric disorders. Assessment measures were administered to 55 (50%) female and 55 (50%) male adult (>18 yr. old) inpatients. Only six (5%) of the 110 inpatients had been diagnosed with comorbid ADHD according to medical charts. In contrast, 55 (50%) patients met criteria for ADHD according to the MINI, and 39 (36%) patients met criteria on the CAARS-S:SV. The higher rates of prevalence for the MINI and the CAARS-S:SV were attributable to symptom criteria for ADHD being similar to those shared with comorbid disorders.     

Indian Perspective on Psychotherapy: Cultural Issues

India is in a state of transition between massively transformed ‘modern’ lifestyles on one hand and the influence of traditional values and customs on the other. In view of the current realities of urbanization, migration, globalisation and societal transformation, the mental health treatment needs have become complex. The article highlights the existing mental health issues and traces the development of various psychotherapeutic techniques in India. An effort has been made to look into the basic tenets of the Indian culture which have a bearing on the conceptualisation and practical application of psychotherapy in the Indian setting. The cross-cultural relevance and adaptability of western psychotherapies in multi-ethnic and collectivistic Asian culture are discussed. In view of the differences between the eastern and western approaches to mental health, challenges in culturally-responsive adaptations are highlighted. It is seen that psychological interventions among masses are beneficial if indigenous approaches based on paradigms like themes from Gita, are cross-fertilized with western psychotherapy. However, there is a need to generate empirical evidence for indigenization of psychological treatments.     

Personal and Social Factors in Achievement-Related Cognition: A Study of Attribution,Appraisal, and Emotion among University Students in Delhi

In recent years, achievement-related cognition and emotion have received a lot of attention from all sections of researchers. A number of researchers have tried to empirically study the determinants and consequences of achievement-related cognition. The explanations given range between individualistic explanations and sociocultural explanations. It is believed that both personal and social factors interact together in bringing about variations in achievement-related cognition and emotion. It is widely accepted that there are variations in human behavior, which are generally believed to be the result of generation-old cultural changes. Cultural factors are believed to exert influence on human behavior and psyche. When one talks about culture, it is mostly treated as a homogeneous entity. Variations within cultures and intra-cultural differences due to various social factors are largely ignored. Researchers world over have started believing in the fact that exposure not only to varying cultural conditions but also to different social factors affects individuals’ psychological functioning. Present research is directed towards exploring variations in achievement-related cognition and emotion due to personal and social factors. Eighty students from a university in Delhi participated in the research. The personal factor of self-construal and social factors like gender, social setting, perceived social class, and family were taken into account. Findings of the study corroborated the hypothesis that both personal and social factors have an impact on achievement-related cognition and emotion.     

Attention and its coupling to action

We discuss two commentaries that we have received on our target article (Humphreys et al., 2010). We elaborate on the evidence for action effects on extinction and discuss whether these effects occur pre or post the selection of a response. In addition, we discuss the neural basis of the effects of action relations on extinction and on the generalization of results on action relations to real‐world examples.     

Tailoring the crack-tip microstructure: a novel approach

This investigation demonstrates a way to innovatively modify the ferritic microstructure at a local scale, particularly at the failure prone area such as Charpy V-notch (CVN) root. Tensile pre-strain (PS) up to 6% and 12% were employed before annealing (An) the samples at 650°C for 15?minutes. Ferrite grain size increased sharply and gradually (along the distance ahead of the notch root) within the microstructurally modified region in 6–12% pre-strained and annealed samples, respectively. The critical strain which promotes strain-induced boundary migration (SIBM), was found to be 0.1 which resulted in abnormally coarse ferrite grains.     

Empirical Vindication of Moral Luck

In resultant moral luck, blame and punishment seem intuitively to depend on downstream effects of a person’s action that are beyond his or her control. Some skeptics argue that we should override our intuitions about moral luck and reform our practices. Other skeptics attempt to explain away apparent cases of moral luck as epistemic artifacts. I argue, to the contrary, that moral luck is real—that people are genuinely responsible for some things beyond their control. A partially consequentialist theory of responsibility justifies moral luck. But this justification is no mere rationalization of the status quo. Recent experimental and evolutionary work on punishment and learning suggests that the very same reasons that justify moral luck have also shaped the evolution of our luck‐sensitive moral practices.     

Neural correlates of deficient response inhibition in mentally disordered violent individuals

In this study, response inhibition and associated neural activation during a motor inhibition paradigm were investigated in (i) men with antisocial personality disorder (APD) with a history of violence (n = 14), (ii) men with schizophrenia with a history of violence (n = 12), (iii) men with schizophrenia without a history of violence (n = 12), and (iv) healthy control subjects (n = 14) using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). At the behavioural level, individuals with schizophrenia showed impaired performance across all conditions, whereas an increased error rate was seen in the APD group only during the conditions requiring inhibition. At the neural level, both violent groups showed reduced thalamic activity, compared with controls, in association with modulation of inhibition by task demands. In addition, the violent schizophrenia group, compared with controls, showed reduced activity in the caudate nucleus during the condition requiring inhibition. It is concluded that violence may not be specifically associated with impaired voluntary inhibition in schizophrenia but this is likely in APD. Reduced thalamic function, perhaps due to its known association with sensorimotor disturbances, is implicated in violent behaviour across both disorders. In addition, caudate dysfunction may contribute, given its role in timing and temporal processing as well as suppression of motor actions, to deficient inhibition and violent behaviour in schizophrenia.