An investigation into the psychosocial functioning of creative children: The impact of ADHD symptomatology

This study examined the relationship among creativity, ADHD symptomatology, temperament, and psychosocial functioning by comparing four groups of children aged 10–12 years: (1) 29 ADHD children without creativity, (2) 16 highly creative children displaying ADHD symptomatology, (3) 18 highly creative children without ADHD symptomatology, and (4) 30 normal controls. Children completed the TTCT, Child Depression Inventory, Revised Child Manifest Anxiety Scale, and Rosenberg Self‐Esteem Scale. Parents completed the Junior Temperament and Character Inventory, Family Environment Scale, and the parent version of the Kastan Children's Attributional Style Questionnaire. Parents completed the Conner's Rating Scales and Child Behavior Checklist, and teachers completed the Child Behaviour Checklist. Results showed that the presence of ADHD symptomatology in creative children was related to their temperamental characteristics, and parent reports of children's levels of anxiety and depression. However, family environment and mother's attributions did not appear to be related to the presence of ADHD symptomatology in creative children. These findings have implications for the development and management of creative children.     

Value Patterns and Content among Families of Soviet Immigrants: SYMLOG Analysis

The purpose of this qualitative study is to understand and compare two immigrant families whose children perceived their families to be well-functioning, and two families whose children perceived them to be poor-functioning. The method of analysis used for studying the values of the families is based on SYMLOG. Four families, who immigrated to Israel during the early seventies from the former USSR, and whose adolescents were born in Israel, were interviewed. The results show that in the two “well-functioning” families, there is a high degree of consensus on their values — those that they accept, as well as, those that they reject. The two “poor-functioning” families did not exhibit identical value patterns — neither in the values that they favor, nor in those that they reject. In terms of content, in the well-functioning families, there was a strong expression of two values: friendliness and the desirability of self-sacrifice in order to reach family goals. In contrast, in the poor-functioning families, the value of conservatism was salient. Finally, all four families expressed strong opposition to the values of strong individualism and nonconformity. Suggestions for family intervention are offered.     

The Chinese Moral Ethos and the Concept of Individual Rights

ABSTRACT This paper is concerned with the contrast in views between traditional mainstream Chinese philosophy and Western liberal individualism on the importance of the concept of individual rights in social and political thought. The contrast is striking because, whereas individual and political rights have long featured in public discourse in the West, in China, mainstream social and political thought has developed without a notion of individual rights. In search of the significance of this major difference, the paper traces ideas of the self in China through Confucian ethics, and compares the Confucian conception of the self with the deontological liberal conception of the subject as a bearer of rights in the West. Having established that the Chinese way of thinking about the self and about moral agency is in stark contrast to the image of the self as a bearer of rights in the deontological conception, the paper goes on to discuss the inadequacy of the moral individualism of a rights-based morality and argues for an alternative view of morality which places importance on the intrinsic value of collective goods and on membership in a society.     

Moralism

abstract In this paper moralism is defined as the illicit use of moral considerations. Three different varieties of moralism are then discussed — moral absolutism, excessive standards and demandingness, and presenting non‐moral considerations as moral ones. Both individuals and theories can be regarded as moralistic in some of these senses. Indeed, some critics of consequentialism have regarded that theory as moralistic. The author then describes the problems associated with each sense of ‘moralism’ and how casuistry evolved to try to deal with some of these problems. The author also defends consequentialism against one charge of moralism [ 1 ].     

PLEASURE AS THE STANDARD OF VIRTUE IN HUME's MORAL PHILOSOPHY1

Abstract: David Hume provides several accounts of moral virtue, all of which tie virtue to the experience of pleasure in the spectator. Hume believed that the appropriate pleasure for determinations of virtue was pleasure corrected by “the general point of view.” I argue that common ways of spelling this out leave the account open to the charge that it cannot account adequately for mistaken judgments of virtue. I argue that we need to see Hume as offering both a metaphysics and an epistemology of virtue, and that Hume's account of virtue can adequately account for mistakes if he is understood as offering a definition of virtue tied to pleasure, but pleasure understood externally.