Are Teachers' Implicit Theories of Creativity Related to the Recognition of Their Students' Creativity?

We examine the structure of implicit theories of creativity among Polish high schools teachers and the role those theories play for the accuracy of teachers' assessment of their students' creativity. Latent class analysis revealed the existence of four classes of teachers, whose perception of a creative student differed: two of these classes defined a creative student incoherently with the existing theories of creativity, and the other two classes did that in accordance with Kirton's (1976) theory of creativity styles, that is, as adaptors or innovators. Teachers who perceived a creative student as an adaptor tended to more accurately assess the creativity of females, whereas teachers perceiving a creative student as an innovator more accurately assessed the creativity of males. We discuss the theoretical and practical consequences of these findings.     

Negative Life Events and Mental Ill-Health Among Women: A Prospective Study of the Main, Moderating and Mediating Effect of Sense of Coherence

Antonovsky’s original observations of mental health among women who had survived Nazi concentration camps became the start for the formulation of sense of coherence (SOC) and suggested that the experience of negative life events can be a risk-factor for, whilst SOC can be a protection-factor against, mental ill-health. In the present study, 1,012 women responded to a questionnaire at two points in time that measured mental ill-health, SOC and the experience of negative life events. The results showed that women who had recently experienced negative life events had higher levels of mental ill-health compared to women who had not recently experienced any negative life events. SOC was also found to have a main effect on mental ill-health but neither moderated nor mediated the relation between negative life events and mental ill-health. Suggestions for future research and practical implications are given.     

Is Sense of Coherence Lowered by Negative Life Events?

The present study aimed to contribute to research on sense of coherence (SOC) by answering the following questions: (1) Is SOC lowered by negative life events? (2) Is an initially low or moderate SOC lowered more by negative life events than an initially high SOC? One thousand and twelve female nurses in Sweden responded to a questionnaire on two occasions with more than 1 year apart. On both occasions the participants reported if they have experienced any of 22 negative life events during the past year and rated their SOC. The results gave negative answers to both questions. In addition, SOC was found stable over time and seems to prevent the experience of negative life events. In sum, these results corroborate Antonovsky’s main postulate that SOC is a salutogenic disposition.     

Phosphorylation of ERK/MAP kinase is required for long-term potentiation in anatomically restricted regions of the lateral amygdala in vivo

We have previously shown that the extracellular signal-regulated kinase/mitogen-activated protein kinase (ERK/ MAPK) is transiently activated in anatomically restricted regions of the lateral amygdala (LA) following Pavlovian fear conditioning and that blockade of ERK/MAPK activation in the LA impairs both fear memory consolidation and long-term potentiation (LTP) in the amygdala, in vitro. The present experiments evaluated the role of the ERK/MAPK signaling cascade in LTP at thalamo-LA input synapses, in vivo. We first show that ERK/MAPK is transiently activated/phosphorylated in the LA at 5 min, but not 15 or 60 min, after high-frequency, but not low-frequency, stimulation of the auditory thalamus. ERK activation induced by LTP-inducing stimulation was anatomically restricted to the same regions of the LA previously shown to exhibit ERK regulation following fear conditioning. We next show that intra-LA infusion of U0126, an inhibitor of ERK/MAPK activation, impairs LTP at thalamo-LA input synapses. Collectively, results demonstrate that ERK/MAPK activation is necessary for synaptic plasticity in anatomically defined regions of the LA, in vivo.     

Business ethics and computer ethics: The view from Poland

An Aristotelian approach to understanding and teaching business ethics is presented and defended. The newly emerging field of computer ethics is also defined in an Aristotelian fashion, and an argument is made that this new field should be called “information ethics”. It is argued that values have their roots in the life and practices of a community; therefore, morality cannot be taught by training for a special way of reasoning. Transmission of values and norms occurs through socialization — the process by which an individual absorbs not only values but also the whole way of life of his or her community. It follows that business ethics and information ethics can be considered kinds of socialization into a profession: role learning and acquiring a new self-identification. This way of understanding fields of applied ethics is especially important for their proper development in Central-Eastern Europe because of endemic factors which are the result of recent political developments there.     

Evaluation of drug toxicity in clinical trials

An increasing number of drugs removed from the market because of unacceptable toxicity raises concerns regarding preapproval testing of drug safety. In the present paper it is postulated that the non-inferiority type of trial should be abandoned in favor of the superiority trial with active controls and less stringent (p<0.1, both for efficacy and toxicity) statistics. This approach will increase sensitivity of detection of drug-induced adverse effects at the expense of increasing false positive results regarding the difference in efficacy between the tested and reference drug. Such a move will increase the protection of future patients. In addition, the proposed design is far more acceptable from the clinical (e.g. no need to specify the statistically expected “unimportant” number of deaths) and ethical points of view, as well as being favored by the strong incentive of involved parties. In the second part of this paper arguments are presented in favor of the hypothesis that placebo (still used in some superiority trials) does not induce adverse effects. The assertion that placebo may induce adverse effects is probably biased by the nature of the clinical experiment. Such a conclusion is supported by studies indicating that placebo-induced adverse effects are disease — and treatment — specific. The modification of clinical trials according to the proposed changes may increase the trials’ sensitivity at detecting adverse effects of drugs. A lecture on the subject of this paper was presented at the 6th International Bioethics Conference on the subject of ‘The Responsible Conduct of Basic and Clinical Research’, held in Warsaw, Poland, 3–4 June 2005.     

On the degree of complexity of sentential logics. A couple of examples

The first part of the paper is a reminder of fundamental results connected with the adequacy problem for sentential logics with respect to matrix semantics. One of the main notions associated with the problem, namely that of the degree of complexity of a sentential logic, is elucidated by a couple of examples in the second part of the paper. E.g., it is shown that the minimal logic of Johansson and some of its extensions have degree of complexity 2. This is the first example of an exact estimation of the degree of natural complex logics, i.e. logics whose deducibility relation cannot be represented by a single matrix. The remaining examples of complex logics are more artificial, having been constructed for the purpose of checking some theoretical possibilities.The paper was presented to the Polish Philosophical Society, Wrocaw Branch, at its meeting on March 27^th, 1980.The authors wish to thank both the referees of Studia Logica for their helpful and very insightful remarks. Following their criticism, we have been able to improve the style and structure of our presentation. In particular, we are indebted to the referees for pointing out a gap in the original proof of Theorem 2, and we have incorporated into the revised text a corrected proof of step (2.1) which one of them was kind enough to supply in detail.