The Effects of a Verbal and a Figural Creativity Training on Different Facets of Creative Potential

This study investigated the effects of different types of creativity interventions on different facets of creative potential, also including more school-related creativity demands. In a sample of 77 fourth-graders in the age between 9 and 12 years, we administered a verbal and a figural creativity training, realized in two school lessons over two consecutive days each. As outcome measures, creative potential in both the verbal and the figural domain by means of two well-established divergent thinking tasks was assessed. As additional measures of creative potential, a story completion task and a picture painting task were administered to examine training effects on more school-related types of creative behavior. The verbal training was found to increase both verbal and figural divergent thinking ability, but not creative potential in the story completion and the picture painting task. The figural training yielded significant training effects only regarding the picture painting task. Findings suggest a specific training effect of the figural creativity training, and moreover indicate that the verbal creativity training, rather than stimulating “verbal” creative abilities per se, was more strongly concerned with domain-general creativity processes including ideational fluency, flexibility, and originality that are characteristics of divergent thinking tasks across different domains.     

Motives for Creativity: Exploring the What and Why of Everyday Creativity

People spend a lot of time on creative activities in their leisure time, but we still know little about what these activities are and what drives them. The literature suggests that several specific motives may be relevant for everyday creative behavior, including enjoyment, expression, challenge, coping, prosocial, social, material, recognition, and duty motives. Across two online studies totaling 750 participants, enjoyment was the strongest motive for everyday creativity, consistent with previous research linking creativity to intrinsic motivation and positive affect. Importantly, however, the relevance of motives differed across creative domains: visual arts, literature, and music were more strongly motivated by expression and coping motives, whereas handicrafts and creative cooking were more strongly motivated by prosocial and recognition motives. Intrinsic motives for creative activities were substantially related to high openness to experience, but explained incremental variance in the prediction of self-reported creativity as well as rated creative achievements. Together, these findings provide new insights into the motivational basis and function of everyday creativity.     

Becoming More Conscientious or More Open to Experience? Effects of a Two-Week Smartphone-Based Intervention for Personality Change

Research indicates that it might be possible to change personality traits through intervention, but this clinical research has primarily focused on changing neuroticism. To date, there are no established, proven techniques for changing other domains of personality, such as conscientiousness and openness. This research examined the effects of a two-week smartphone-based intervention to either change one facet of conscientiousness (i.e. self-discipline) or one facet of openness to experience (i.e. openness to action). Two intervention studies (total N = 255) with two active intervention groups for mutual comparisons were conducted. Results of self-reports and observer reports showed that people who wanted to become more self-disciplined were less self-disciplined at pretest. Similarly, people who wanted to become more open to action were less open to action at pretest. The results showed that people who chose the self-discipline intervention showed greater increases in self-discipline, and people who chose the openness to action intervention showed greater increases in openness to action compared with the other group. Changes were maintained until follow-up two and six weeks after the end of the intervention. Future work is needed to examine whether these personality changes are enduring or reflect temporary accentuation as a result of participation in the intervention. © 2020 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Loneliness and solitude in adolescence: A confirmatory factor analysis of alternative models

The present study tested a four-factor model of adolescent loneliness and solitude that comprises peer-related loneliness, family loneliness, negative attitude toward solitude, and positive attitude toward solitude. Nine different instruments for a total of 14 scales and derivative subscales were completed by a sample of mid-adolescents (N = 534) from Grades 10 through 12 (aged 15–18 years) in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. As expected, the four-factor solution provided a better fit to the data than did alternative models that comprised just a single factor, or two and three factors. Use of the Loneliness and Aloneness Scale for Children and Adolescents (LACA) is recommended, because the instrument measures all four aspects of the model. Implications for current theories on adolescent loneliness and associated phenomena, such as adolescents’ attitude toward being on their own, are briefly discussed.     

Mindestanforderungen für Schuldfähigkeitsgutachten*

Ohne Zusammenfassung Wegen der besonderen Bedeutung für die Bemühungen um die Qualit?tssicherung in den forensischen Disziplinen wird der folgende Artikel, entstanden aus einer interdisziplin?ren Diskussion am BGH, hier nochmals den Fachkollegen zur Kenntnis gegeben. H. Sa? * bereits 2005 erschienen in NStZ 25:57–62     

Judging the animacy of words: The influence of typicality and age of acquisition in a semantic decision task

The age at which members of a semantic category are learned (age of acquisition), the typicality they demonstrate within their corresponding category, and the semantic domain to which they belong (living, non-living) are known to influence the speed and accuracy of lexical/semantic processing. So far, only a few studies have looked at the origin of age of acquisition and its interdependence with typicality and semantic domain within the same experimental design. Twenty adult participants performed an animacy decision task in which nouns were classified according to their semantic domain as being living or non-living. Response times were influenced by the independent main effects of each parameter: typicality, age of acquisition, semantic domain, and frequency. However, there were no interactions. The results are discussed with respect to recent models concerning the origin of age of acquisition effects.     

Comparisons of women with high and low trait impulsivity using behavioral models of response-disinhibition and reward-choice

Two types of behavioral models of impulsive behavior, response-disinhibition/attentional and reward-choice response models, were used to compare women grouped by high (Impulse+, n=43) and low (Impulse−, n=43) self-reported impulsive behavior on the Eysenck I₇ Questionnaire. Two of the four different tasks tested were response-disinhibition/attentional models; these included the Immediate and Delayed Memory Task and the GoStop Task. The other two tasks were based on the reward-choice model of impulsivity and included the Single Key Impulsivity Paradigm and the Two-Choice Reward Task. Of particular interest was whether commission errors (response-disinhibition/attentional paradigms) or a preference for smaller–sooner rewards over larger–later rewards (reward-choice) would differ between the groups. Participants completed one session of each task in a single day. The most significant findings were that the Impulse+ group had: (1) elevated commission errors; (2) lower stimulus discriminability (between target and catch stimuli); and (3) poorer response inhibition to a stop signal. Responding on the response-disinhibition/attentional tasks distinguished between the impulsivity groups while the reward-choice tasks did not. These results demonstrate that women who report higher levels of trait impulsivity respond in a manner consistent with previous studies examining impulsive behavior.     

Latent Classes of Dysregulated Behaviors Relate to Negative Mental Images

Dysregulated behaviors (DBs), such as self-harm or binge eating, are related to various negative outcomes. In this study, we investigate how classes of individuals vary in their level of DBs. We compare the classes with regards to their experiences regarding negative mental images and emotion regulation strategies. A web-based survey assessed eleven DBs in a sample of N=912 adults. A latent class analysis (LCA) identified a class of 168 adults that were prone to various DBs (“high(DBs)”). Another class (n?=?46) reported drunkenness and risks for drug use and overeating (“high(Intake)”). The majority of individuals (n?=?698) featured a low rate of DBs (“low(DBs)”). The high(DBs) exhibited the highest scores in distressing imagery and maladaptive emotion regulation. The high(Intake) had a low overall profile; however, it displayed increased imagery nowness. Class differences were leveled by depressive symptoms. The findings help extend the knowledge on DBs and their correlates. Clinical implications are discussed.     

The revelation effect: A meta-analytic test of hypotheses

Judgments can depend on the activity directly preceding them. An example is the revelation effect whereby participants are more likely to claim that a stimulus is familiar after a preceding task, such as solving an anagram, than without a preceding task. We test conflicting predictions of four revelation-effect hypotheses in a meta-analysis of 26 years of revelation-effect research. The hypotheses’ predictions refer to three subject areas: (1) the basis of judgments that are subject to the revelation effect (recollection vs. familiarity vs. fluency), (2) the degree of similarity between the task and test item, and (3) the difficulty of the preceding task. We use a hierarchical multivariate meta-analysis to account for dependent effect sizes and variance in experimental procedures. We test the revelation-effect hypotheses with a model selection procedure, where each model corresponds to a prediction of a revelation-effect hypothesis. We further quantify the amount of evidence for one model compared to another with Bayes factors. The results of this analysis suggest that none of the extant revelation-effect hypotheses can fully account for the data. The general vagueness of revelation-effect hypotheses and the scarcity of data were the major limiting factors in our analyses, emphasizing the need for formalized theories and further research into the puzzling revelation effect.