Increasing Students' Scientific Creativity: The “Learn to Think” Intervention Program

The “Learn to Think” (LTT) Intervention Program was developed for raising thinking abilities of primary and secondary school students. It has been implemented in more than 300 schools, and more than 200,000 students took part in the experiment over a 10‐year span. Several longitudinal intervention studies showed that LTT could promote the development of students' thinking ability, learning motivation, and learning strategy as well as raise academic performance in primary schools. This article describes a study of the influence and the delayed effects of LTT on the scientific creativity of secondary school students. One hundred and seven students were selected from a secondary school, 54 of them participated in the LTT every 2 weeks and the rest had not. The intervention lasted 2 years, and the delayed effect was explored half a year after terminating the intervention. The Scientific Creativity Test for Secondary School Students was used four times from pre‐test to delayed post‐test. The results indicated that the LTT did promote the development of scientific creativity of secondary school students, and the effects on the scientific creativity were not necessarily immediate, but tended to be long‐lasting.     

Integration of Test Results with Clinical Observations A Diagnostic Case Study

In this study, we aimed to investigate the application of an externally rated measure of interpersonal representations (Social Cognition and Object Relations Scale [SCORS]; Westen, 1995) to dream narratives. A total of 80 student participants enrolled at a private university in the New York City metropolitan area completed a Dream Log and affect adjective checklist (Wellman, 2002) based on a recalled dream at both 1 month and 3 months following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Using the dreams provided in this study we examined the interrater reliability of SCORS ratings, the relationship of SCORS variables to an independently rated measure of dream distortion, and the relationship of SCORS variables to participants' own ratings of dream affect. Results indicated that dreams were reliably rated using the SCORS, 3 cognitive SCORS variables were significantly related to dream distortion, and affective SCORS variables were meaningfully related to participants' own ratings of affect in their dreams. Findings from this study provide support for the application of SCORS ratings to dream narratives. We discuss implications for further research and clinical application.     

An Introductory Lecture on Personality Assessment

The role of personality assessment is minimized in many introductory psychology presentations for a variety of reasons. Personality assessment is an area of great breadth and is understandably formidable to those whose training has been outside this area of specialization.

The following lecture was designed to digest at least some parts of the area of personality assessment in as non-technical language as possible for use of instructors introducing its basic concepts.     

The Susceptibility of the EPPS to Faking in Simulated and Actual Employment Situations

To investigate the fakability of the Edwards Personal Preference Schedule (EPPS) 60 Ss were given the scale under standard (anonymous) instructions; a month later, a third of them were given the scale under ‘simulated’ instructions, a third under instructions to make a ‘good impression’ and a third under ‘actual employment’ conditions. Since the pattern of scores differed significantly between the standard instructions and each of the latter instructions it was concluded that the EPPS is very easily faked and hence should be used with caution outside the research setting.     

Temporal Organization and the Initial Reproductive Tendency

Assessment of approach and avoidance aspects of affiliation motivation was reviewed. Ss were 60 white male university students. Split-half reliabilities were .71 and .60. Convergent and divergent aspects of validity were investigated in terms of self-report measures. Scales that correlated significantly with Affiliative Tendency converged meaningfully in terms of both contents and intercorrelations; those with nonsignificant correlations could also have been expected to diverge. For Sensitivity to Rejection, convergent and divergent patterns appeared but were less clear. The two scores were summed to obtain a Dependency score, which showed meaningful correlations, too. Affiliative Tendency increased with increasing ordinal position.     

Increased Error-Related Brain Activity in Six-Year-Old Children with Clinical Anxiety

Anxiety disorders are the most frequently diagnosed form of psychopathology in children and often result in chronic impairment that persists into adulthood. Identifying neurobehavioral correlates of anxiety that appear relatively early in life would inform etiological models of development and allow intervention and prevention strategies to be implemented more effectively. The error-related negativity (ERN), a negative deflection in the event-related potential at fronto-central sites approximately 50 ms following the commission of errors, has been consistently found to be larger among anxious adults. The current study sought to extend these findings to even younger individuals: the ERN was elicited by a Go/NoGo task in 48 six year-old children with a clinical anxiety disorder assessed by diagnostic interview and 48 age-matched controls. In addition to child anxiety disorder, the ERN was examined in relation to maternal history of anxiety disorder, which was previously related to a smaller ERN. Anxious children were characterized by a larger (i.e., more negative) ERN and maternal history of anxiety disorder was associated with a smaller ERN. Thus, the relationship between an increased ERN and clinical anxiety is evident by age 6, and this effect appears independent from an opposing influence of maternal anxiety history on the ERN. These findings support the ERN as a promising neurobehavioral marker of anxiety, and implications are discussed.     

Is It What You Do,or When You Do It? The Roles of Contingency and Similarity in Pro‐Social Effects of Imitation

Being imitated has a wide range of pro‐social effects, but it is not clear how these effects are mediated. Naturalistic studies of the effects of being imitated have not established whether pro‐social outcomes are due to the similarity and/or the contingency between the movements performed by the actor and those of the imitator. Similarity is often assumed to be the active ingredient, but we hypothesized that contingency might also be important, as it produces positive affect in infants and can be detected by phylogenetically ancient mechanisms of associative learning. We manipulated similarity and contingency between performed and observed actions in a computerized task. Similarity had no positive effects; however, contingency resulted in greater enjoyment of the task, reported closeness to others, and helping behavior. These results suggest that the pro‐social effects of being imitated may rely on associative mechanisms.