Creative Collaboration in Young Children’s Playful Group Drawing

Collaborations that lead to creative outputs occur within different group contexts and with diverse populations, including young children. Two cases of collaborative drawing are presented in this article to consider how young children engage in creative collaboration by negotiating meaning with others through open-ended group drawing. We conceptualize group drawing as a form of social play where children can advance personal creative abilities through interactions and shared understandings with others. The two cases derive from a study that examined young children's group play through drawing. A preschool class of 16 children (aged 4–5) was observed during free play over eight 1-hour sessions. Children were free to come and go as they pleased from an art station consisting of large drawing surfaces and a variety of drawing materials. Findings from the two selected cases suggest the development of shared meaning supports creative collaboration in group drawing situations, as children use a variety of verbal and non-verbal strategies to communicate their ideas. Implications are offered for early childhood educators and environments seeking to promote creative collaboration.     

Some epistemological and methodological issues in clinical research

Epistemological realism was postulated as a prolegomenon to clinical research. Observation of single cases must precede any effort for generalization. Observation of men by men is always a field process. In clinical research the experimenter exercises a great amount of power over the subject, thus a naive empirical approach and operationism may be misleading. Clinical theory must be coated in a language different from empirical data and enable the formation of causal chains of events.     

Requesting Belief

Requests belong to a family of forms of social influence on action that appear problematic when employed in the attempt to directly influence belief. Explaining why this is so is more difficult than it might at first appear. The fact that belief is not directly subject to the will can only be part of the explanation. It must also be the case that requests are incapable of providing epistemic reasons in a way that parallels that in which they provide practical reasons. I propose an account of the nature of requests that is in a position to explain why requests are incapable of doing this.     

Time-window for sensitivity to cooling distinguishes the effects of hypothermia and protein synthesis inhibition on the consolidation of long-term memory

The effects of hypothermia on memory formation have been examined extensively, and while it is clear that post-training cooling interferes with the process of consolidation, the nature of the temperature sensitive processes disrupted in this way remain poorly defined. Post-training manipulations that disrupt consolidation tend to be effective during specific time-windows of sensitivity, the timing and duration of which are directly related to the mechanism through which the treatment induces amnesia. As such, different treatments that target the same basic processes should be associated with similar time-windows of sensitivity. Using this rationale we have investigated the possibility that cooling induced blockade of long-term memory (LTM) stems from the disruption of protein synthesis. By varying the timing of post-training hypothermia we have determined the critical period during which cooling disrupts the consolidation of appetitive long-term memory in the pond snail Lymnaea. Post-training hypothermia was found to disrupt LTM only when applied immediately after conditioning, while delaying the treatment by 10 min left the 24 h memory trace intact. This brief (<10 min) window of sensitivity differs from the time-window we have previously described for the protein synthesis inhibitor anisomycin, which was effective during at least the first 30 min after conditioning [Fulton, D., Kemenes, I., Andrew, R. J., & Benjamin, P. R. (2005). A single time-window for protein synthesis-dependent long-term memory formation after one-trial appetitive conditioning. European Journal of Neuroscience, 21, 1347-1358]. We conclude that hypothermia and protein synthesis inhibition exhibit distinct time-windows of effectiveness in Lymnaea, a fact that is inconsistent with the hypothesis that cooling induced amnesia occurs through the direct disruption of macromolecular synthesis.     

Implicit awareness of ambiguity: a role in the development of obsessive-compulsive disorder

The cognitive-behavioral model of obsessive-compulsive disorder proposes that obsessional symptoms are the consequence of the manner in which intrusive cognitions are interpreted [e.g., Salkovskis, P. M. (1998). Cognitive-behavioral approach to understanding obsessional thinking. British Journal of Psychiatry, 173(35S), 53-63]. The present study suggests that this may be attributable to maladaptive implicit cognitive processing, a deficit that results in the explicit awareness of ambiguity in idiographic obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) stimuli. The present study examines decision-making responses of low and high OCD scorers in a non-clinical undergraduate sample. Via a computer console, participants were shown sentence statements for three levels of ambiguity. They were then presented with a propositional statement for which they had to indicate agreement or disagreement for sentences of varying ambiguity. After this, the participants indicated whether they were completely confident or unconfident as regards their previous agree-disagree decisions. Results indicate that the high compared to the low OCD scoring group had less agreement and subsequent less confidence in decisions made for sentences of varying ambiguity. Response latencies partially fitted the predicted hypotheses. Consequently, an addition to Salkovskis, Forester, and Richards' [1998. Cognitive-behavioral approach to understanding obsessional thinking. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 173(35S), 53-63] model of OCD is suggested: namely that an implicit ambiguity deficit mediates the likelihood of normally occurring intrusions developing into abnormal obsessions. Methodological limitations and future research are considered.     

Stability of cognitive vulnerabilities to depression: a short-term prospective multiwave study

The stability of 3 cognitive vulnerabilities--a negative cognitive style, dysfunctional attitudes, and rumination--as well as depressive symptoms as a benchmark were examined to investigate whether cognitive vulnerabilities are stable, enduring risks for depression. A sample of adolescents (6th-10th graders) completed measures of these 3 cognitive vulnerabilities and depressive symptoms every 5 weeks for 4 waves of data across 5 months. Mean-level and differential stability were examined for the sample overall and by age subgroups. A negative cognitive style exhibited mean-level stability, whereas rumination and dysfunctional attitudes showed some mean-level change. Absolute magnitudes of test-retest reliabilities were strong for depressive symptoms (mean r= .70), moderately high for a negative cognitive style (mean r= .52), and more modest for rumination (mean r= .28) and dysfunctional attitudes (mean r= .26). Structural equation modeling showed that primarily enduring processes, but not contextual forces, contributed to the patterning of these test-retest reliabilities over time for a negative cognitive style and dysfunctional attitudes, whereas both enduring and contextual dynamics appeared to underlie the stability for rumination. Theoretical and clinical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Discerning the Division of Cognitive Labor: An Emerging Understanding of How Knowledge Is Clustered in Other Minds

The division of cognitive labor is fundamental to all cultures. Adults have a strong sense of how knowledge is clustered in the world around them and use that sense to access additional information, defer to relevant experts, and ground their own incomplete understandings. One prominent way of clustering knowledge is by disciplines similar to those that comprise the natural and social sciences. Seven studies explored an emerging sense of these discipline-based ways of clustering of knowledge. Even 5-year-olds could cluster knowledge in a manner roughly corresponding to the departments of natural and social sciences in a university, doing so without any explicit awareness of those academic disciplines. But this awareness is fragile early on and competes with other ways of clustering knowledge. Over the next few years, children come to see discipline-based clusters as having a privileged status, one that may be linked to increasingly sophisticated assumptions about essences for natural kinds. Possible mechanisms for this developmental shift are examined.     

Psychological correlates of car use: A meta-analysis

This meta-analysis synthesised quantitative research into potentially modifiable psychological correlates of car use and intentions to drive. Online psychology and transportation databases were searched, and inclusion criteria applied to potentially relevant records. An ancestry approach was also employed to search selected publications. Meta-analyses of effect size rs were performed on 23 unique study datasets. Results generally supported the predictive utility of variables derived from the Theory of Planned Behaviour, though cognitions towards not driving displayed uniformly larger effects than were observed for car use cognitions. There was also a strong effect of habit on behaviour. Support for effects of pro-environment cognitions on driving was weak. However, a dearth of available evidence limited our findings and precludes development of clear evidence-based recommendations for intervention design. Directions for future research are discussed.