Synaesthesia,creativity and art: What is the link?

It has been suggested that individuals with synaesthesia may show heightened creativity as a result of being able to form meaningful associations between disparate stimuli (e.g. colour, sound). In this study, a large sample (N=82) of people with various kinds of synaesthesia were given two psychometric tests of creativity (Remote Associates Test, Alternate Uses Test) and were also asked about the amount of time engaged in creative arts (visual art, music). There was a significant tendency for synaesthetes to spend more time engaged in creative arts and this was, at least in part, dependent upon the type of synaesthesia experienced. For example, synaesthetes experiencing vision from music were far more likely to play an instrument than their other synaesthetic counterparts. There was no relationship between this tendency and the psychometric measures of creativity, but synaesthetes did outperform controls on one of the two psychometric measures (Remote Associates). We conclude that the tendency for synaesthetes to be more engaged in art is likely to have a different mechanism to psychometric measures of creativity, and that there is no direct link between them. Although synaesthetes may well perform better on some measures of creativity, we suggest that synaesthetes have better bottom‐up access to certain associations, but are not necessarily better able to use them flexibly (in divergent thinking).     

The Opposite of Human Enhancement: Nanotechnology and the Blind Chicken Problem

Nanotechnologies that have been linked to the possibility of enhancing cognitive capabilities of human beings might also be deployed to reduce or eliminate such capabilities in non-human vertebrate animals. A surprisingly large literature on the ethics of such disenhancement has been developed in response to the suggestion that it would be an ethically defensible response to animal suffering both in medical experimentation and in industrial livestock production. However, review of this literature illustrates the difficulty of formulating a coherent ethical debate. Well structured arguments for disenhancement can be made on the basis of mainstream views on the basis of ethical obligations to animals, but these arguments have not been persuasive against the moral intuition that disenhancements are unethical. At the same time, attempts to ground these intuitions in a coherent philosophical doctrine have been plagued by logical fallacies and question begging assertions. As such, the debate over animal disenhancement forecasts an enduring conundrum with respect to the core question of transforming the nature of sentient beings, and this conundrum is logically independent of claims that relate either to the distinctive of human beings or to issues deriving from the emphasis on enhancement.     

Agrarian Philosophy and Ecological Ethics

Mainstream environmental ethics grew out of an approach to value that was rooted in a particular conception of rationality and rational choice. As weaknesses in this approach have become more evident, environmental philosophers have experimented with both virtue ethics and with pragmatism as alternative starting points for developing a more truly ecological orientation to environmental philosophy. However, it is possible to see both virtue ethics and pragmatism as emerging from older philosophical traditions that are here characterized as “agrarian.” Agrarian philosophy stresses the role of nature, soil and climate in the formation of moral character as well as social and political institutions. As such, reaching back to the agrarian tradition may provide a way to move forward with both virtue oriented themes as well as pragmatist themes in developing ecological ethics.     

Parents' emotion‐related beliefs and behaviours in relation to children's coping with the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks

To assess relationships between parental socialization of emotion and children's coping following an intensely emotional event, parents' beliefs and behaviours regarding emotion and children's coping strategies were investigated after a set of terrorist attacks. Parents (n=51) filled out the Parents' Beliefs about Negative Emotions questionnaire and were interviewed within two weeks of the attacks. Their elementary and middle school‐aged children were interviewed eight weeks later. First, parents' beliefs were related to two kinds of parental behaviours. Parents' beliefs about both the value of and the danger of children's emotions were positively related to their discussion with their children. Parents' belief about children's emotions as dangerous was also negatively related to parents' expressiveness with their children. Second, parents' beliefs were related to five kinds of coping strategies reported by their children. Parents' belief about children's emotions as valuable predicted children's problem‐solving, emotion‐oriented, and support‐seeking coping following the terrorist attacks. Parents' belief about children's emotions as dangerous predicted children's avoidance and distraction coping following the attacks. Parents' beliefs about the importance of children's emotions may foster a family atmosphere that facilitates children's coping with intensely emotional events. Results support differentiated, multi‐faceted analysis of the broader construct of parental beliefs. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Updating the contents of working memory in depression: interference from irrelevant negative material

This study was designed to assess the effects of irrelevant emotional material on the ability to update the contents of working memory in depression. For each trial, participants were required to memorize 2 lists of emotional words and subsequently to ignore 1 of the lists. The impact of irrelevant emotional material on the ability to update the contents of working memory was indexed by response latencies on a recognition task in which the participants decided whether or not a probe was a member of the relevant list. The authors compared response latencies to probes from the irrelevant list to response latencies to novel probes of the same valence (intrusion effect). The results indicate that, compared to control participants in both neutral and sad mood states, depressed participants showed greater intrusion effects when presented with negative words. In an important finding, intrusion effects for negative words were correlated with self-reported rumination. These findings indicate that depression is associated with difficulties removing irrelevant negative material from working memory. Results also indicate that the increased interference from irrelevant negative material is associated with rumination.     

A measure of agreement: an exploration of the relationship of D. W. Winnicott and Phyllis Greenacre

The British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott and the American psychoanalyst Phyllis Greenacre were both deeply absorbed by the vicissitudes of the infant's and young child's psychic development. Their clinical observations and theoretical ideas display striking convergences and reciprocal influences. Winnicott was deeply influenced by Greenacre's account of maturational processes, an important stimulus to his thinking that originated outside of the British Psychoanalytical Society. Greenacre's writings on early ego development and creativity were influenced by Winnicott's concept of transitional phenomena. The fact that these relationships have remained unexplored until now indicates the need for less insular accounts of the development of psychoanalytic thought on the two sides of the Atlantic.     

Neuroimaging and Depression: Current Status and Unresolved Issues

ABSTRACT— Major depression is among the most debilitating, prevalent, and recurrent of all psychiatric disorders. Over the past decade, investigators have examined the neural mechanisms associated with this disorder. In this article we present an overview of neuroimaging research that has assessed the structure and functioning of the amygdala, subgenual anterior cingulate cortex, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in major depression. We then describe results of studies that have attempted to elucidate the nature of the relations among these brain structures. The picture that emerges from these investigations is one in which heightened activity in limbic structures that underlie the experience and expression of emotion dampens activation in dorsal cortical structures that are involved in affect regulation, reducing their ability to influence limbic activation. We conclude by highlighting unresolved issues concerning the roles of these structures in depression and their relation to specific symptoms of this disorder.     

Observer ratings of health and sickness: can other people tell us anything about our health that we don't already know?

After administering interviews covering health conditions, physical limitations, optimism, and affect to 851 older adults, interviewers rated the health and sickness of the interviewees. Observers' ratings of health and sickness were more highly correlated with the severity of participants' self-reported health conditions than were participants' self-ratings of health. This finding is likely attributable to participants' self-ratings of health being more highly correlated with their optimism and positive affect than the observers' ratings. Participants rated as sicker and less healthy at baseline were at a 3 times greater risk for mortality over 114 months. This association was independent of participants' self-rated health as well as demographics, self-reported health conditions, years of smoking, physical limitations, body mass index, optimism, and affect.     

Dyadic processes of disclosure and reciprocity in bargaining with communication

We offer a study revealing the mechanisms through which communication helps actual bargaining behavior outperform economic predictions. The possibility of individually strategic behavior in the presence of private information leads to game‐theoretic predictions of less than full efficiency. We present a one‐stage, simultaneous offers bargaining game in which buyers and sellers have independent, privately held valuations for the item being sold (i.e. a bilateral auction with two‐sided private information). In three communication treatments, parties are: (a) allowed face‐to‐face communication prior to submitting offers; (b) allowed written communication prior to submitting offers; or (c) allowed no‐communication prior to submitting offers. When parties are allowed pre‐play communication, we find nearly full efficiency (98%). We examine two systematically predictable aspects of dyadic interaction—disclosure and reciprocity—to explain how negotiators achieve this efficiency. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.