Enhanced divergent thinking and creativity in musicians: a behavioral and near-infrared spectroscopy study

Empirical studies of creativity have focused on the importance of divergent thinking, which supports generating novel solutions to loosely defined problems. The present study examined creativity and frontal cortical activity in an externally-validated group of creative individuals (trained musicians) and demographically matched control participants, using behavioral tasks and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). Experiment 1 examined convergent and divergent thinking with respect to intelligence and personality. Experiment 2 investigated frontal oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin concentration changes during divergent thinking with NIRS. Results of Experiment 1 indicated enhanced creativity in musicians who also showed increased verbal ability and schizotypal personality but their enhanced divergent thinking remained robust after co-varying out these two factors. In Experiment 2, NIRS showed greater bilateral frontal activity in musicians during divergent thinking compared with nonmusicians. Overall, these results suggest that creative individuals are characterized by enhanced divergent thinking, which is supported by increased frontal cortical activity.     

Evaluating Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for psychological research on the symbolic control of attention

The use of online crowdsourcing services like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (AMT) as a method of collecting behavioral data online has become increasingly popular in recent years. A growing body of contemporary research has empirically validated the use of AMT as a tool in psychological research by replicating a wide range of well-established effects that have been previously reported in controlled laboratory studies. However, the potential for AMT to be used to conduct spatial cuing experiments has yet to be investigated in depth. Spatial cuing tasks are typically very basic in terms of their stimulus complexity and experimental testing procedures, thus making them ideal for remote testing online that requires minimal task instruction. Studies employing the spatial cuing paradigm are typically aimed at unveiling novel facets of the symbolic control of attention, which occurs whenever observers orient their attention through space in accordance with the meaning of a spatial cue. Ultimately, the present study empirically validated the use of AMT to study the symbolic control of attention by successfully replicating four hallmark effects reported throughout the visual attention literature: the left/right advantage, cue type effect, cued axis effect, and cued endpoint effect. Various recommendations for future endeavors using AMT as a means of remotely collecting behavioral data online are also provided. In sum, the present study provides a crucial first step toward establishing a novel tool for conducting psychological research that can be used to expedite not only our own scientific contributions, but also those of our colleagues.     

Missional Formation for Life‐giving Interfaith Encounter

Our world is characterized by a plurality of religions and cultures, including people who do not profess any religious faith or belief. Each religion cherishes and reveres its norms and ethos and seeks to uphold and project its sacredness both publicly and privately. If the multiplicity of religious expressions is not accepted as a gift, it may fuel and sustain unhealthy rivalry. With this understanding in mind, the need for pedagogy that prepares Christian missioners and workers to engage in life‐affirming dialogue and cooperation with people of other belief systems remains crucial. This article seeks to reinforce the case for a missional formation that includes and mainstreams basic aspects of interfaith knowledge, knowing full well that mission activities are not carried out in a vacuum, but among human beings in their social and communal locations.     

‘Everybody's entitled to their own opinion’: ideological dilemmas of liberal individualism and active citizenship

Conversational interview accounts were used to explore everyday understandings of political participation on the part of young white adults in England. Analysis focussed on dilemmatic tensions within respondents' accounts between values of active citizenship and norms of liberal individualism. Respondents could represent community membership as engendering rights to political participation, whilst also arguing that identification with local or national community militates against the formulation of genuine personal attitudes and rational political judgement. Respondents could represent political participation as a civic responsibility, whilst also casting political campaigning as an illegitimate attempt to impose personal opinions on to others. Formal citizenship education did not appear to promote norms of political engagement but rather lent substance to the argument that political decision-making should be based on the rational application of technical knowledge rather than on public opinion or moral principle. In conclusion we question whether everyday understandings of responsible citizenship necessarily entail injunctions to political action. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mild Affective Shifts and Creativity: Effects on Idea Generation,Evaluation, and Implementation Planning

This study investigated the impact of mild shifts in affective tone (i.e., pleasant vs. unpleasant) and arousal (i.e., high vs. low) on three creative processes. Undergraduates read short stories designed to induce affective shifts and then were asked to generate solutions to a complex business problem. Shifts in affective tone and arousal interacted to influence idea generation and implementation planning, but not idea evaluation. The strongest creative performance was exhibited by participants who experienced a stable and pleasantly toned, low-arousal (i.e., relaxed) state and by those who shifted to an unpleasantly toned, high-arousal (i.e., angry) state. In contrast, those who shifted to an unpleasantly toned, low-arousal (i.e., sad) state or a pleasantly toned, high-arousal (i.e., happy) state tended to exhibit poorer creative performance. These results demonstrate the need to revisit the popular conception that organizations should promote intense levels of pleasant affect to enhance employee creativity.     

LITURGICALLY TRAINED MEMORY: A READING OF SUMMA THEOLOGIAE III.83

Drawing on Ciceronian rhetorical tropes, Thomas Aquinas treats the rite of the Eucharist in terms of the classical ars memoriae. The Eucharist, for Aquinas, is the schooling in desire whereby we are trained to order the associations of our memory to their proper objects in terms of their relations to God. He thus conceives of the liturgy of the Mass as rhetoric proper, which truly teaches, moves and delights. Since memory is the condition of all thought, as both Thomas and Augustine claim, the Eucharist is the “site” of all theological production, and therefore the liturgy is the art of memory of which all other similar arts are derivative.     

Orthogonal and oblique simple structures

A quick approximation of the best-fitting orthogonal simple structure from the known oblique simple structure is here developed.