Creativity of Chinese and American Cultures: A Synthetic Analysis

The article integrates the seven papers of the two special issues with a special focus on discussing the differences in people's beliefs about creativity between the Chinese and American cultures: How it is conceived, evaluated, and nurtured. It uses three metaphors to capture major differences in these aspects, and highlights areas with profound cultural variations in conceptions and creative education for future research.     

Capacity to Handle Unassimilable Material: Coping Strategies of Schizophrenics and Normals

With anxiety conceptualized as resulting from a backlog of unassimilable or incongruent material, two processes were postulated to reflect coping strategies, assimilation and accommodation. These were assessed by means of a “picture interpretation task.” The hypothesis that schizophrenics fail to cope with unassimilable material because they are unable to accommodate (the process of changing internal schemata) was supported. The second prediction that paranoids would increase assimilation while nonparanoids would suppress assimilation was not supported.     

Malevolent Creativity: A Functional Model of Creativity in Terrorism and Crime

Although creativity is often seen as an aspect of self-fulfillment, it is important to recognize its social effects. The traditional view is that these should be beneficial, creativity thus being benevolent. However, those who wish to do deliberate harm to others can also display creativity, in this case malevolent creativity. This is governed by the same principles as benevolent creativity, differing only in its intended purpose. Like any creativity, malevolent creativity can be examined through its products. Concepts from research on creative products provide important insights into the activities of terrorists and criminals, especially the idea of competing solutions. The key ideas in malevolent creativity are summarized in 11 principles; recognizing these helps in developing more effective means for counteracting terrorism.     

The role of surface discontinuity and shape in 4-month-old infants' object segregation

This research examined whether 4-month-old infants use a discontinuity in an object's front surface to visually segregate a display into two separate objects, and whether object shape enables its use. In Experiment 1, infants saw a three-dimensional display composed of two parts with distinctly different shapes. Two groups of infants saw a display in which these two shapes were divided by a visible discontinuity in the front surface (i.e., a boundary between the two objects). One of these groups saw the display move apart at the discontinuity when a gloved hand pulled one object; the second group saw the two objects move together as a single unit. A third group saw a modified version of this display that had no discontinuity present. The results suggested that infants regarded the discontinuity as an indication that the display could be composed of more than one object. In Experiment 2, infants saw the same display, but with a shape that did not highlight the discontinuity. The infants in this study showed no evidence of using the discontinuity. Together, the findings suggest that 4-month-old infants use the surface discontinuity between two objects as an indication that multiple objects could be present in a display, but only when scanning the outer edges of the display leads them to attend to it.     

Higher-order semantic structures in an African Grey parrot’s vocalizations: evidence from the hyperspace analog to language (HAL) model

Previous research has described the significant role that social interaction plays in both the acquisition and use of speech by parrots. The current study analyzed the speech of one home-raised African Grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus erithacus) across three different social contexts: owner interacting with parrot in the same room, owner and parrot interacting out of view in adjacent rooms, and parrot home alone. The purpose was to determine the extent to which the subject’s speech reflected an understanding of the contextual substitutability (e.g., the word street can be substituted in context for the word road) of the vocalizations that comprised the units in her repertoire (i.e., global co-occurrence of repertoire units; Burgess in Behav Res Methods Instrum Comput 30:188–198, 1998; Lund and Burgess in Behav Res Methods Instrum Comput 28:203–208, 1996). This was accomplished via the human language model hyperspace analog to language (HAL). HAL is contextually driven and bootstraps language “rules” from input without human intervention. Because HAL does not require human tutelage, it provided an objective measure to empirically examine the parrot’s vocalizations. Results indicated that the subject’s vocalization patterns did contain global co-occurrence. The presence of this quality in this nonhuman’s speech may be strongly indicative of higher-order cognitive skills.     

American and Chinese Similarities and Differences in Defining and Valuing Creative Products

This review of the literature explores how Americans and Chinese view creativity and what they expect from creative products. American and Chinese explicit beliefs about creativity (i.e., expert opinions) share many similarities. Implicit beliefs, however, show more divergence: Americans tend to value novelty and more “groundbreaking” types of creativity, whereas Chinese tend to appreciate creativity within constraints, such as reworking a traditional concept. The context of how people respond to creativity obviously varies by culture, although there are also some communal and universal creative ideals.     

Frames of reference for anticipatory action in 4-month-old infants

The spatial representations of 4-month-old infants were examined in two experiments using a modified version of the visual expectation paradigm (VExP). The experiments were designed in order to determine what spatial frames of reference were available to infants for making anticipatory saccades. In Experiment 1, we found that infants most often used a retinocentric frame of reference that did not take into account their current eye position in making an anticipatory saccade. However, Experiment 2 revealed that under certain conditions infants are more likely to make anticipatory saccades consistent with a body- or object-centred frame of reference. The main difference between the two experiments was the degree to which the featural properties of the stimuli varied. The results shed light on the development of spatial representations for action in infancy.     

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong,Moral Psychology Volume 4： Free Will and Moral Responsibility

This book is the fourth volume of a series on moral psychology edited by philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. Each of these volumes is organized in debate format, with ten or so main essays each followed by responses from two critics, with an opportunity for the author of the main essay to make a final reply.The present volume takes on the question of free will and moral responsibility, and addresses the question of what implications recent discoveries in neuroscience and social psychology have for our traditional notions of moral and legal responsibility, as well as for popular and philosophical notions of free will. Given the constant barrage of media coverage of scientists declaring that science has now proven that free will is an illusion, and even that morality itself is an illusion, this volume covers a topic that is timely, relevant, and important.     

The WPPSI-R: You can''t judge a test by its colors

The Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence-Revised (WPPSI-R) is a thorough revision of the 1967 WPPSI, with expanded age range (3–7 years), new colorful materials, new item types for very young children, a new icebreaker subtest (Object Assembly), and a comprehensive manual. The test's strengths are its attractive pictures, strong evidence of construct validity, excellent reliability, and superb standardization sample. The revised battery's weaknesses are the heavy reliance on bonus points for Block Design and Object Assembly, the cumbersome scoring system for Geometric Design, the relative instability over time of some subtests (especially nonverbal), and its user-unfriendliness. Administration difficulties come from directions to the examiner that are too detailed and confusing, and directions to the child that include difficult concepts.