On Making and Keeping Promises

Do the conditions under which promises are made determine whether they ought to be kept? Philosophers have placed a number of conditions on promising which, they hold, must be met in order to make promise-keeping obligatory. In so doing, they have distinguished valid promises from invalid promises and justified promises from promises that are not justified. Considering such conditions, one by one, we argue that they are mistaken. In the first place, the conditions they lay down are not necessary for either valid or justified promise-making. In the second place, promises need not meet such conditions in order to create moral obligations. In general, such analyses of promising fail because they suffer from a confusion between promise-making and promise-keeping. Philosophers have wrongly supposed that obligations to keep promises are dependent upon, or derivable from, the quality of the promises themselves, at the time they are made, instead of focusing on conditions that must be satisfied at the time when promises are supposed to be kept. It is not the quality of a promise that determines an obligation to keep it but the rightness or wrongness of performing the promised act.     

Evidence for clinical smoking cessation for adolescents.

OBJECTIVE: This report reviews the evidence that informs the role of health and mental health care providers in addressing youth smoking cessation. DESIGN: Qualitative literature review. RESULTS: Physicians do not consistently screen adolescents for tobacco use and fail to provide recommended cessation advice. Challenges to addressing smoking cessation include the need for procedures to ensure confidentiality and the existence of competing demands to provide other services. Few published studies have specifically addressed the effectiveness of clinical interventions. Interventions that require return visits or follow-up phone contacts are technically difficult to implement in this population. Successful interventions may require resources not available in nonresearch settings. Most studies have used brief clinical intervention as a control condition, making it impossible to evaluate its effectiveness. CONCLUSION: There is little evidence that supports current clinical smoking cessation guidelines for adolescents. More research is needed to develop inexpensive, efficient clinical interventions that can provide youths access to smoking cessation help. Future challenges include reorganizing clinical systems to offer greater counseling by support staff or in electronic formats and to provide effective booster messages and follow-up care in a population that is difficult to track.     

The Creativity Matrix: Spotlights and Blind Spots in Our Understanding of the Phenomenon

In this paper, we organize past and present theories and models of creativity by using a new conceptual framework—the creativity matrix—with the aim of highlighting the dimensions of creativity we know a lot about and those we tend to either ignore or find difficult to study. This matrix is formed by bringing together a developmental model of creativity (the 4 C's) and a structural one (the 5 A's). We start by briefly describing these two conceptual frameworks, and then, we proceed to exploring the matrix itself by describing how the 5 A's are dynamically organized at each “level” of the 4 C's. Importantly, our overview of the matrix is informed by existing models and concepts that address one of more of the C's and the A's. This gives us a unique opportunity to take stock of what has been studied so far and, toward the end, consider new avenues for the development of theory and research agendas within creativity studies.     

How help during pregnancy can undermine self-efficacy and increase postpartum intentions to quit

Pregnancy reflects a common experience for women in today's workforce, yet recent data suggest that some women scale back or leave the workforce following childbirth. Considering these effects on women's careers, researchers have sought to understand the underlying dynamics of these decisions. Here, we explore a paradoxical reason for weakened postpartum career attitudes: help that women receive during pregnancy. We integrate stereotype threat and benevolent sexism theories to explain how the effects of help on postpartum intentions to quit may be transmitted through reductions in work self-efficacy. In doing so, we consider the role of perceived impact—or the extent to which help interferes with versus enables women's perceived ability to continue performing their work role. Results of a weekly diary study of 105 pregnant employees suggest that work-interfering help led to decreased self-efficacy for work during the following week. Furthermore, there was an indirect effect of average help received at work during pregnancy on postpartum intentions to quit the workforce through reductions in work self-efficacy that was stronger insofar as help was work-interfering versus work-enabling. Taken together, our results highlight unintended negative consequences that occur when others provide ineffective support to women at work during pregnancy.