Internal structure and standardised scores of the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking

The present work sets out to study the internal structure of the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) and to establish standardised scores that will enable the test to be used in both a diagnostic and educational context. 649 students (319 girls and 330 boys), aged 5 to 12 years from various schools in Murcia and Alicante (SE Spain), took part in the study. The findings suggest that the psychometric characteristics of TTCT are satisfactory, and its internal structure can be attributed to three factors that are responsible for a high percentage of the variance (73.8%). The standardised score tables, which are provided for first time in this context, will be useful in the evaluation of creativity and the identification of students with high intellectual abilities.     

Radical Innovation and End-User Involvement: The Ambilight Case

To make technology research more effective and to deal with fierce cost competition, technology research should be more focused on radical innovation and needs to adopt a more end-user-focused approach. Product improvement is already quite often building on knowledge collected around consumers’ experiences with these products to come with a next, improved generation of products. However, in case of creating novel products from “scratch,” this will be more difficult. The user-centered research approach including insights, scenarios, and experience prototypes provides a good method to incorporate the consumer perspective in the earliest stages of the product creation process. The development of the Ambilight TV will be used as a case to illustrate this approach.     

Defining task-set reconfiguration: The case of reference point switching

Some researchers argue that task switching involves task-set reconfiguration-that is, changing the existing task set to perform a different task. Although this idea is intriguing, it is often unclear what is reconfigured and which processes are involved in reconfiguration. We addressed these issues by defining task sets, identifying differences between them, and obtaining evidence that was diagnostic of reconfiguration. In two experiments, subjects performed relative judgment tasks that involved comparing a target with a reference point that repeated or switched across trials. The task was the same on every trial, but the task set was not, because a task-set parameter-the reference point-had to be changed. Target-reference point distance effects that changed with the reference point provided diagnostic evidence that reconfiguration occurred, and this reconfiguration led to switch costs. We discuss how our approach can be generalized to define reconfiguration more clearly in other task-switching situations. nt|mis|This research was supported by Grants BCS 0133202 and BCS 0446806 from the National Science Foundation to G.D.L.     

Telepsychology and Self-help: The Treatment of Fear of Public Speaking

This work presents a self-help, Internet-based telepsychology program for the treatment of public speaking fears. The system is comprised of 3 parts: The assessment protocol gives the patient information about his or her problem (i.e., amount of interference it creates in his or her life, severity, degree of fear and avoidance). The system also includes a structured treatment protocol, organized into separate blocks, reflecting the patient’s progress. This ensures that the patient does not skip any steps in the treatment (something quite common in traditional self-help manuals), which provides more control over the process. The treatment protocol is a cognitive-behavioral program that provides exposure to the feared situation using videos of real audiences. Finally, the control protocol assesses treatment efficacy, not only at closure, but also at every intermediate step. Efficacy data from 12 social phobia patients are presented from pretreatment to posttreatment and at 1-month follow-up. These preliminary data support the efficacy of our telepsychology program for the treatment of fear of public speaking. This is a preliminary work in a promising research path that examines the possibility of using the Internet for the treatment of psychological disorders.     

Seven principles of goal activation: a systematic approach to distinguishing goal priming from priming of non-goal constructs.

Countless studies have recently purported to demonstrate effects of goal priming; however, it is difficult to muster unambiguous support for the claims of these studies because of the lack of clear criteria for determining whether goals, as opposed to alternative varieties of mental representations, have indeed been activated. Therefore, the authors offer theoretical guidelines that may help distinguish between semantic, procedural, and goal priming. Seven principles that are hallmarks of self-regulatory processes are proposed: Goal-priming effects (a) involve value, (b) involve postattainment decrements in motivation, (c) involve gradients as a function of distance to the goal, (d) are proportional to the product of expectancy and value, (e) involve inhibition of conflicting goals, (f) involve self-control, and (g) are moderated by equifinality and multifinality. How these principles might help distinguish between automatic activation of goals and priming effects that do not involve goals is discussed.     

Using the Internet to find offline sex partners.

We aimed to expand upon the demographic characteristics and gender differences among those who have met someone on the Internet who they later met offline and had sex with as well as any relationship with cybersex, sexually transmitted infections, and online sexual problems. We analyzed data collected through an online questionnaire in 2002 in Sweden including a total population of 1836 respondents of which 1458 used the Internet for sexual purposes. Of those, 35% men and 40% women reported to have met offline sex partners online. The majority reported an occurrence of one to two times, whereas 10% reported six or more times. The analysis suggested women aged 34-49 and 50-65 years, homo- and bisexual men, and singles more likely to have this experience. They were also more likely to have engaged in cybersex. No relationships were found with sexually transmitted infections or online sexual problems. The results suggest that using the Internet to find sex partners may be less hazardous for the general Internet users than pointed out by prior research about this behavior often focusing on specific sub groups of Internet users.     

A survey of women's social representations of aging and rejuvenation

The goal of this work was to analyze the social representations that women of three different age groups had about aging, rejuvenating, and methods of rejuvenation. The research was performed in S?o Paulo between 2004 and 2005. The participants of this research were three groups of women of different ages: 19 to 24 years, 25 to 35 years, and over 60 years. The data were collected by the focus group technique. Data was analyzed using the lexical analysis software ALCESTE 4.5. The main results show a social representation of aging centered on losses and gains. The subjects appraised the possibility of using rejuvenating methods only when it was extremely necessary, because of the health risks that most of them involve. The three groups agreed about natural methods of rejuvenating instead of resorting to invasive methods.     

Effects of prime task on affective priming by facial expressions of emotion

Priming of affective word evaluation by pictures of faces showing positive and negative emotional expressions was investigated in two experiments that used a double task procedure where participants were asked to respond to the prime or to the target on different trials. The experiments varied between-subjects the prime task assignment and the prime-target interval (SOA, stimulus onset asynchrony). Significant congruency effects (that is, faster word evaluation when prime and target had the same valence than when they were of opposite valence) were observed in both experiments. When the prime task oriented the subjects to an affectively irrelevant property of the faces (their gender), priming was observed at SOA 300 ms but not at SOA 1000 ms (Experiment 1). However, when the prime task assignment explicitly oriented the subjects to the valence of the face, priming was observed at both SOA durations (Experiment 2). These results show, first, that affective priming by pictures of facial emotion can be obtained even when the subject has an explicit goal to process a non-affective property of the prime. Second, sensitivity of the priming effect to SOA duration seems to depend on whether it is mediated by intentional or unintentional activation of the valence of the face prime.     

Feeling of knowing for names in response to faces

Participants were asked to recall the names when shown photographs of faces in both a semantic task (Experiment 1) and an episodic task (Experiments 2 and 3). When recall failed, feeling of knowing (FOK) ratings were solicited. In addition, participants reported on the strategies that they used to make their ratings, whether they could recall other pieces of information (the target-accessibility strategy, e.g., Koriat, A. (1993). How do we know that? The accessibility model of the feeling of knowing. Psychological Review, 100, 609–639) or whether the faces simply looked familiar (the cue-familiarity strategy, e.g., Schwartz, B. L., & Metcalfe, J. (1992). Cue familiarity but not target accessibility enhances feeling of knowing ratings. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 18, 1074–1083). In all experiments, FOK ratings were fairly accurate in that participants were successful in predicting their performance on a subsequent recognition test. More importantly, participants reported using the cue-familiarity strategy more often, although they gave higher FOK ratings when they reported using the target-accessibility strategy. The FOK ratings that were given using the two strategies were equally accurate.     

Mereological vagueness and existential vagueness

It is often assumed that indeterminacy in mereological relations—in particular, indeterminacy in which collections of objects have fusions—leads immediately to indeterminacy in what objects there are in the world. This assumption is generally taken as a reason for rejecting mereological vagueness. The purpose of this paper is to examine the link between mereological vagueness and existential vagueness. I hope to show that the connection between the two forms of vagueness is not nearly so clear-cut as has been supposed.