A Cross Cultural Examination of Creative Problem Solving Style: The Dutch Translation of VIEW

Creativity and Creative Problem Solving are globally important. This study examined the cross‐cultural applicability of creative problem solving styles by translating VIEW: An Assessment of Problem Solving Style from its native English into Dutch and examining its psychometric properties and preliminary validation evidence. In general, support was found for the Dutch translation of VIEW in that it performed similarly to its original with regard to item performance on factor analysis, had acceptable levels of internal consistency and stability over time, and correlated in a similar manner with two alternative measures of style. Implications for future translations were identified.     

Science as Structured Imagination

This paper offers an analysis of scientific creativity based on theoretical models and experimental results of the cognitive sciences. Its core idea is that scientific creativity — like other forms of creativity — is structured and constrained by prior ontological expectations. Analogies provide scientists with a powerful epistemic tool to overcome these constraints. While current research on analogies in scientific understanding focuses on near analogies, where target and source domain are close, we argue that distant analogies — where target and source domain differ widely — are especially useful in periods of intense conceptual change. To argue this point, we discuss three case studies from the history of science: early physiologists like Harvey, early evolutionary biologists like Darwin, and recent theorists on the evolution of the human mind like Mithen.     

“A GREATEST MIRACLE”: STANLEY CAVELL,MORAL PERFECTIONISM,AND THE ASCENT INTO THE ORDINARY

What to make of “the ordinary,”“the everyday,” and their common “eventfulness”? What to think of what Veena Das, in her recent book Life and Words, prefaced by Stanley Cavell, has called our need to “descent into the ordinary”? Is there a parallel figure of “ascent,” again, into the same “ordinary,” that we might we want to juxtapose with it and that resembles the motif of “change,” even “conversion,” that Cavell analyzes at some length in The Claim of Reason and throughout his oeuvre as a whole? And what could be our reasons for doing so? This essay will draw on Cavell's reading of Ibsen's work in the volume Cities of Words to spell out what such an “ascent” might mean.     

Ethics and Marginal Cases: the rights of the mentally handicapped

ABSTRACT  Some beings, including children, animals and the mentally handicapped, seem to deserve moral consideration, despite the fact that they are not rational or moral agents. These so-called marginal cases create a problem for theories that heavily stress the role of moral and/or rational agency in ethics: the latter seem unable to account for the former's moral status. This paper discusses the recent and original attempt of Loren Lomasky to solve this problem. It is argued that Lomasky's arguments are self-defeating because they can only succeed by relying on common-sense morality and, thus, by giving up the heavy stress on the role of rational agency in ethics.     

Parent-Adolescent Conflict and Stress When Parents Are Living with Aids

Parental perceptions of conflict and stress with their adolescent children are described, and their associations with demographic factors, physical health, and lifestyle are examined. Adolescent-parent conflicts, parenting stress, and parents' health, substance use, and sexual lifestyle were assessed among 151 parents living with AIDS. Parents living with AIDS reported a mean of 3.3 (SD = 1.3) areas of conflict with their adolescents and 1.5 (SD = 1.7) stressful parenting events over the previous 3 months. The parents were very ill, with many physical symptoms and diseases. Simultaneously, substance use was common (17% used daily), but not injection drug use (3.3%). Half had a sexual partner (63% protected their partners by using condoms consistently). Regression analysis revealed that parent-adolescent conflict was significantly associated with high parental drug use; stressful parenting events were significantly related to the lifestyle (high drug use and frequent sex acts) of Latino and African American parents, but not of white parents. Results of the analysis indicate that, in contrast to parents with other illnesses, parent-adolescent conflict and stressful parenting events were not influenced by parents' health status, but were significantly influenced by substance use and sexual lifestyles.     

Body Poly-texts: Discourses of the Anorexic Body

It is now increasingly acknowledged that anorexia nervosa is a ‘culture-bound syndrome’ which must be understood within the context of an increasing idealization of female thinness and a high prevalence of dieting and body dissatisfaction, particularly amongst women and girls. Whilst this socioculturally-oriented perspective is important, it is also simplistic to conceptualize anorexia simply as a ‘slimmer's disease’. The ways in which contemporary Western culture is imbricated in anorexia are both complex and multiple. This paper uses a discourse-analytic approach, informed by feminist Foucauldian theory, to examine some of the multiple and often conflicting meanings and discursive constructions of the (female) anorexic body. The paper is based on a series of interviews conducted with 23 women (21 diagnosed as anorexic and 2 self-diagnosed). The analysis focuses on the explication of two discourses: a romantic discourse and a discourse of Cartesian dualism evidenced in the interviews. By contrasting the very different ways in which these two discourses constitute the anorexic body, this paper aims to provide thereby a socioculturally contextualized and gender-oriented account of the multiple discursive constructions of ‘anorexia nervosa’ and ‘anorexic’ bodies. Implications for psychotherapeutic interventions are discussed.