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.     

D-optimal design for the Rasch counts model with multiple binary predictors

In this paper we derive optimal designs for the Rasch Poisson counts model and its extended version of the (generalized) negative binomial counts model incorporating several binary predictors for the difficulty parameter. To efficiently estimate the regression coefficients of the predictors, locally D-optimal designs are developed. After an introduction to the Rasch Poisson counts model and its extension, we will specify these models as particular generalized linear models. Based on this embedding, optimal designs for both models including several binary explanatory variables will be presented. Therefore, we will derive conditions on the effect sizes for certain designs to be locally D-optimal. Finally, it is pointed out that the results derived for the Rasch Poisson models can be applied for more general Poisson regression models which should receive more attention in future psychological research.     

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     

Entwicklung eines Curriculums für psychosomatische Grundversorgung in Frauenheilkunde und Geburtshilfe

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Bindungsforschung und therapeutische Beziehung

Zusammenfassung Die von John Bowlby konzipierte Bindungstheorie postuliert ein primäres Bedürfnis nach Bindung und Nähe zu versorgenden Personen, das in der frühen Kindheit zur Ausbildung innerer Repräsentanzen/Arbeitsmodelle von Bindung und Bindungserfahrungen führt, in die sowohl Aspekte des Selbstkonzeptes als auch Konzepte über die Reaktionen relevanter Anderer integriert werden. Die entwicklungspsychologische Forschung hat in den vergangenen Jahrzehnten ein tragfähiges empirisches Fundament für die Bindungstheorie geliefert und mit dazu beigetragen, dass die Theorie auch im klinischen Kontext zunehmend reflektiert wird. Die therapeutische Beziehung kann aus bindungstheoretischer Sicht zumindest unter bestimmten Umständen als eine spezifische Form einer Bindungsbeziehung erachtet werden. Ein derartiges Modell hat in jüngster Vergangenheit zu einer Vielzahl theoretischer Überlegungen über die Qualität der therapeutischen Beziehung aus bindungstheoretischer Sicht geführt. Neben theoretischen Beiträgen zur Thematik gibt es mittlerweile auch eine immer größer werdende Zahl empirischer Untersuchungen, die sich mit der Relevanz bindungstheoretischer Konstrukte für den Therapieerfolg, den therapeutischen Prozess und die therapeutische Allianz beschäftigen. Eine Zusammenfassung dieser Studien zeigt, dass es für Psychotherapeuten lohnend sein kann, sich mit den Konzepten der Theorie näher zu beschäftigen, beispielsweise um Brüche und Schwierigkeiten in der therapeutischen Beziehung besser zu verstehen und ggf. verhindern zu können.Eine modifizierte Version dieser Übersicht wird erscheinen in: Hermer M, Röhrle B (Hrsg) (2006) Handbuch der therapeutischen Beziehung – Beziehungsgestaltung, Bündnisprobleme, Kontexte. dgvt, Tübingen. Der Vorabdruck erfolgt mit Genehmigung der Herausgeber.     

Adaptation to a direction-dependent visuomotor gain in the young and elderly

Consistent with the widely accepted notion of separate specification of movement amplitude and direction, it has been argued that there is also a categorical difference between adaptation to novel visuomotor rotations and to novel visuomotor gains. In line with this view, ageing seems to affect rotation and gain adaptation differently in that age-related impairments are consistently found for the former, but not for the latter. In this study we ask whether the contrasting findings could also be ascribed to differences in the level of difficulty of gain and rotation adaptation tasks, respectively. In order to increase the difficulty of gain adaptation, younger and older participants had to adapt to a direction-dependent gain transformation. Results revealed direction-dependent adaptation in both groups. More importantly, we replicated the typical findings of age-related impairments of adaptation, but not of aftereffects, that were previously only reported for rotation adaptation. Younger participants also showed superior explicit knowledge regarding the novel visuomotor mapping as compared to the older participants. We show that this knowledge was used by younger participants to selectively augment adaptive shifts. Finally, our findings suggest that the difficulty of the novel visuomotor transformation and, related to this, the involvement of explicit knowledge in adaptation is critical for age-related changes to show up, but not the type of adaptation task, rotation and gain adaptation, respectively.