Synesthesia and creativity in fine arts students: An Empirical Look

Abstract:

A survey of 358 fine arts students at three large universities indicated that 23% (84) experienced synesthesia in a spontaneous and consistent manner, and 49% (175) reported no such experience. From this subject pool, 61 synesthetes and 61 controls, equated on gender, major, year in school, and verbal intelligence, received a battery of four creativity measures. The synesthetes scored significantly higher than controls on all four creativity measures; and their self‐rated frequency and vividness of synesthesia though significantly intercorrelated, correlated marginally with the measures of creativity. The results are consistent with anecdotal reports that synesthetes are often involved in musical and artistic fields, and possessive of a high degree of creativity.     

Assessment of creativity with the ACL: An empirical comparison of four scales

Several scales have been developed from the Adjective Check List to assess creativity, with almost no comparative data to evaluate them. In this study, two samples, one of research scientists and one of advanced architecture students, were assessed using the A CL scored for the Domino, Gough, Schaefer, and Yarnell scales of creativity. The results indicated a fair amount of equivalence among the four scales, with a tendency for the Domino and the Gough scales to have better convergent and discriminant validity.     

Out of Mind, Out of Sight: Unexpected Scene Elements Frequently Go Unnoticed Until Primed

The human visual system employs a sophisticated set of strategies for scanning the environment and directing attention to stimuli that can be expected given the context and a person’s past experience. Although these strategies enable us to navigate a very complex physical and social environment, they can also cause highly salient, but unexpected stimuli to go completely unnoticed. To examine the generality of this phenomenon, we conducted eight studies that included 15 different experimental conditions and 1,577 participants in all. These studies revealed that a large majority of participants do not report having seen a woman in the center of an urban scene who was photographed in midair as she was committing suicide. Despite seeing the scene repeatedly, 46 % of all participants failed to report seeing a central figure and only 4.8 % reported seeing a falling person. Frequency of noticing the suicidal woman was highest for participants who read a narrative priming story that increased the extent to which she was schematically congruent with the scene. In contrast to this robust effect of inattentional blindness, a majority of participants reported seeing other peripheral objects in the visual scene that were equally difficult to detect, yet more consistent with the scene. Follow-up qualitative analyses revealed that participants reported seeing many elements that were not actually present, but which could have been expected given the overall context of the scene. Together, these findings demonstrate the robustness of inattentional blindness and highlight the specificity with which different visual primes may increase noticing behavior.     

Are Past Normative Behaviors Predictive of Future Behavioral Intentions?

We acknowledge the limitations in measures of moral reasoning and pursue an alternative technique by investigating past behaviors as they relate to present behavioral intentions. Our purpose is to evaluate the merits of patterned normative behavior for predicting present and future, morally relevant outcomes. Participants (N = 177) completed a policy capturing experimental design responding to questions that orthogonally varied the situational nature of the decision context. Results indicate that past normative behaviors are significantly and directly related to ethical behavioral intentions. Moreover, they moderate the relationships between situational factors and intended outcomes as well as moral reasoning and intended outcomes.     

The functionalist theory of stratification: Two decades of controversy

The author examines the 1945 and 1948 versions of the Davis‐Moore functionalist theory of stratification. The analysis explores the basic postulates, assumptions, and logical articulation of the theory and isolates its distinctively functionalist components. This is followed by a historical account of the major criticisms leveled at the theory. The critics have succeeded in showing the fallacious and tautologous character of the functionalist components, thus, in effect, destroying the theory as a theory. Despite this destruction, various portions of the Davis‐Moore theory are shown to be usable, to contain valuable insights, and to be capable of further development.     

Pleasure and Aversion: Challenging the Conventional Dichotomy

Philosophy and its descendents in the behavioral sciences have traditionally divided incentives into those that are sought and those that are avoided. Positive incentives are held to be both attractive and memorable because of the direct effects of pleasure. Negative incentives are held to be unattractive but still memorable (the problem of pain) because they force unpleasant emotions on an individual by an unmotivated process, either a hardwired response (unconditioned response) or one substituted by association (conditioned response). Negative incentives are divided into those that are always avoided and those that are avoided only by higher mental processes—archetypically the passions, which are also thought of as hardwired or conditioned. Newer dichotomies within the negative have been proposed, hinging on whether a negative incentive is nevertheless sought (“wanted but not liked”) or on an incentive's being negative only because it is confining (the product of “rule worship”). The newer dichotomies have lacked motivational explanations, and there is reason to question conditioning in the motivational mechanism for the older ones.

Both experimental findings and the examination of common experience indicate that even the most aversive experiences, such as pain and panic, do not prevail in reflex fashion, but because of an urge to attend to them. The well-established hyperbolic curve in which prospective rewards are discounted implies a mechanism for such an urge, as well as for the “lower” incentives in the other dichotomies. The properties of these lower incentives are predicted by particular durations of temporary preferences on a continuum that stretches from fractions of a second to years.     

The role of self‐determination in the relationship between social support and physical activity intentions

Using the hierarchical model of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (HMIEM) and self‐determination theory as theoretical frameworks, the purpose of the present study was to assess the role of motivation‐related variables in the relationship between perceptions of social support and intentions to be physically active. Undergraduate students completed surveys assessing perceptions of social support, psychological needs satisfaction, self‐determination, and future exercise intentions. Model fit with the data was examined and was considered acceptable, indicating that social support was positively related to the satisfaction of psychological needs, which, in turn, was related positively to self‐determination and then to physical activity intentions.     

Investigations of Flicker and Fusion: I. The Effect of Practice,Under the Influence of Various Attitudes,on the CFF

Hunt, J. M., Ed. Personality and the Behavior Disorders. (2 vols.) New York: Ronald Press, 1944. Pp. 1242. Reviewed by H. J. Eyesenck