Creativity Development of High-Achieving Students

Few studies on creativity have focused on creativity development in various grade levels for high-achieving students. The purpose of this study was to explore the developmental trajectories of creative ability for high-achieving students. The participants constituted a national representative sample of 982 male (N = 506) and female (484) students from grades 1 to 10 in five governorates in Oman (Muscat, South-Al Batinah, South- Al Sharqia, Dhofar, and Al Dhakilia). The students completed two subtests of the Profile of Creative Abilities (PCA), a measure of creative potential, namely drawings and categories. There was an evidence of a developmental trend of creativity across grade levels. The Multi-variate analysis of variance (MANOVA) showed that the main effect of grade was statistically significant for the drawings subtest. Also, the main effect of gender was also statistically significant for the drawings subtest. The main effect of interaction (gender X grade) was not significant. Overall, females’ creative performance was significantly better than males’ in the Creativity Index score. The results of the study are discussed in the light of existing literature about developmental trends and gender differences in creative thinking.     

Relationship Between Mother,Father, and Peer Attachment and Empathy With Moral Authority

We explored the relationship between mother, father, and peer attachment security, empathy, and moral authority in order to clarify certain problems of previous empirical research on such relationships. A sample of 202 Persian-speaking undergraduate students completed questionnaires pertaining to these constructs. The results revealed that mother and father attachment were significantly correlated with family, society welfare, and equality sources of moral authority, whereas peer attachment security was related only to society welfare and equality sources of moral authority. Out of the empathy subscales, only empathic concern was associated with moral authority sources. Empathic concern was also related to mother, father, and peer attachment, whereas perspective taking was correlated with mother and peer attachment. The combination of empathic concern and mother, father, and peer attachment predicted significant amount of variance of “principle source of moral authority” (including society welfare and equality sources). Findings support existence of a strong relationship between attachment security and the content of moral thought of adolescents, and findings redress an empirical imbalance in research literature on the relation of attachment and morality.     

Community Counselling in African Contexts

This article explores community counselling as a form of professional practice for psychologists, with a particular focus on practices that are relevant in African contexts. The discussion identifies and discusses various models of practice identified in community psychology, including an ecological perspective, a public health and community mental health framework, interventions that focus on promoting a sense of community, indigenous approaches to community counselling and a critical or social action framework. Examples relating to each of these models of practice are drawn from various African settings, providing practitioners with some insights into how theory can be operationalised into practices that are relevant to African contexts. The article concludes with a discussion on community research, with a particular focus on ethical considerations relevant to a community approach in African contexts. The latter discussion emphasises the importance of working with the community as partners, and suggests the possibility of developing a Code of Ethics aimed specifically at guiding community counselling practice in African contexts.     

Association Between Religiosity and Happiness Among a Group of Muslim Undergraduate Students

The association between religiosity and happiness has been the focus of much recent research. The majority of them report a positive correlation between a religious attitude and behavior and the level of happiness. However, different findings have been reported. The aim of the current study was to test link between religiosity and happiness among a group of undergraduate Muslim students. Two hundred and seventy-one health-related students agreed to participate and completed Oxford Happiness Index and a religious belief questionnaire. It was found that higher score on religious belief was significantly linked to the level of happiness (r = .256, P = .01). The result confirms that individuals with a more religious attitude experience more happiness. The result of this study should be considered in programs designed to improve overall well-being of university students.     

Tel Aviv Mizrah

Before immigrating to Israel, first-generation Iraqi Jews were deeply attached to their identity as Mizrahi Jews. Their mother tongue was Arabic and they had grown up in an oriental environment. Therefore, it was not easy for them to adopt the Euro-Israeli identity that the dominant Ashkenazi-European stratum in Israel compelled them to accept. Despite strong Westernizing tendencies in Israeli society, the first generation of Iraqi Jewish immigrants maintained strong links to the Iraqi customs and traditions they had acquired in Iraq, particularly with regard to the musical folklore and oriental cuisine. On the other hand, second-generation Iraqi Jews were more familiar with Israeli society than their parents; they grew up in Israel and learned Hebrew in Israeli schools along with Ashkenazi Jews and other ethnic groups. This paper establishes connections between the historical realities of Iraqi Jewish immigrants and the literary representation of their world in the trilogy Tel-Aviv Mizrah (Tel Aviv East) written in 2003 by the Iraqi Jewish author Shimon Ballas, through a comparison of Ballas's literary vision with the historical realities of Iraqi Jewish identity in Israel over the course of two generations.     

Book Reviews

Abstract

The Unconscious at Work: Individual and Organizational Stress in the Human Services, ed. Anton Obholzer and Vega Zagier Roberts, London: Routledge, 1994, 225pp., £37.50 hb., £14.99 pb.

Treating Survivors of Satanist Abuse, ed. Valerie Sinason, London: Rout-ledge, 1994, 320 pp., £37.50 hb., £14.99 pb.

From Dependency to Autonomy: Studies in Organisation and Change, Eric Miller, London: Free Association Books, 1993, 343 pp., £22.50 pb.

Counselling - The Deaf Challenge, Mairiam Corker, London: Jessica Kingsley, 1994, 262 pp., £22.50 hb.

Doing Counselling Research, John McLeod, London: Sage Publications, 1994, 216 pp., £10.95 pb.

International Review of Health Psychology, ed. S. Maes, H. Leventhal and M. Johnson, Chichester: Wiley, 1994, 230 pp., £55 hb.

Schizophrenia: Exploring the Spectrum of Psychosis, ed. RJ. Ancill, S. Holliday and J. Higenbotham, Chichester: Wiley, 1994, 376 pp., £60 hb.

Handbook of Group Psychotherapy, ed. Addie Fuhriman and Gary M. Burlingame, New York: Wiley, 1994, 588 pp., £45.50 hb.     

The Oxford Happiness Questionnaire: Transformation from an Ordinal to an Interval Measure Using Rasch Analysis

The scientific study of happiness requires accurate measurement of the construct that satisfies assumptions of parametric statistics and thus allows both researchers and clinicians to make reliable and valid comparisons with the relevant data sources. The 29-item Oxford Happiness Questionnaire (OHQ) is a widely-used scale for assessment of personal happiness. While its psychometric properties are acknowledged to be acceptable, it presents scores on an ordinal scale and may thus not discriminate precisely between individual happiness levels. The current study aimed to improve precision and item functioning of the OHQ by applying Rasch analysis to a sample of 281 participants. To correct disordered thresholds items were rescored in a uniform fashion. Four items displayed poor relationships with the latent trait of happiness and were removed. Best fit to the unidimensional Rasch model was achieved after locally dependent items were combined into subtests and adjusted for personal differences. Using the ordinal-to-interval conversion tables published here, ordinal OHQ scores can now be transformed to interval level data and thus subjected to parametric statistical analysis without violating fundamental assumptions. The precision of the instrument can be improved significantly by these minor modifications without the need to modify the original response format.     

Inside Out and Counseling: Creative Interventions to Facilitate Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is an essential component of mental health and functioning. When traditional talk therapy is intimidating for young clients, creative approaches can supplement practice to foster a nonthreatening and supportive environment. The present article introduces innovative interventions inspired by the popular film Inside Out as helpful mechanisms to facilitate emotional intelligence in clients.     

Subjective age-of-acquisition norms for 600 Turkish words from four age groups

The main purpose of this study was to report age-based subjective age-of-acquisition (AoA) norms for 600 Turkish words. A total of 115 children, 100 young adults, 115 middle-aged adults, and 127 older adults provided AoA estimates for 600 words on a 7-point scale. The intraclass correlations suggested high reliability, and the AoA estimates were highly correlated across the four age groups. Children gave earlier AoA estimates than the three adult groups; this was true for high-frequency as well as low-frequency words. In addition to the means and standard deviations of the AoA estimates, we report word frequency, concreteness, and imageability ratings, as well as word length measures (numbers of syllables and letters), for the 600 words as supplemental materials. The present ratings represent a potentially useful database for researchers working on lexical processing as well as other aspects of cognitive processing, such as autobiographical memory.