Teachers’ creativity,playfulness, and style of interaction with children

Abstract:

This investigation examined the relationships among a teacher's creative thinking, playfulness, and degree of sensitivity in their interactions with preschool children during play. These variables were operationally defined as scores on measures of ideational fluency, playful disposition, and quality of self‐reported play interaction. The Multidimensional Stimulus Fluency Measure, the Adult Behavior Inventory, and the Play Interaction Scale were administered to 46 students and 37 teachers of three‐ and four‐year old children. The Play Interaction Scale, developed for this study, was based on environmental components identified in earlier research as facilitative of play. Subjects indicated the frequency with which they might respond in a structured, elaborative, or unstructured manner to 20 vignettes describing the play of children. Results indicated that the expected positive relationships among creativity, playfulness, and an elaborative teaching style were found only for the students. The predicted negative relationships between creativity and a structured interaction style were found only for the experienced teachers.     

Creativity and achievement in design coursework

Abstract:

Findings from this investigation with 81 college students indicate that ideational fluency is a valid predictor of student achievement in an interior design course. Both original and popular ideational fluency as measured by the Multidimensional Stimulus Fluency Measure were related to the course grade, design criteria scores, and the final project grade. Very few studies have found such a clear relationship between performance on any measure of creativity and actual performance in a course. The results suggest that the MSFM is a valuable tool for use in conjunction with other criteria in admissions screening for an interior design program.     

Shaping Medical Students' Attitudes Toward Ethically Important Aspects of Clinical Research: Results of a Randomized,Controlled Educational Intervention

The effects of research ethics training on medical students' attitudes about clinical research are examined. A preliminary randomized controlled trial evaluated 2 didactic approaches to ethics training compared to a no-intervention control. The participant-oriented intervention emphasized subjective experiences of research participants (empathy focused). The criteria-oriented intervention emphasized specific ethical criteria for analyzing protocols (analytic focused). Compared to controls, those in the participant-oriented intervention group exhibited greater attunement to research participants' attitudes related to altruism, trust, quality of relationships with researchers, desire for information, hopes about participation and possible therapeutic misconception, importance of consent forms, and deciding quickly about participation. The participant-oriented group also agreed more strongly that seriously ill people are capable of making their own research participation decisions. The criteria-oriented intervention did not affect learners' attitudes about clinical research, ethical duties of investigators, or research participants' decision making. An empathy-focused approach affected medical students' attunement to research volunteer perspectives, preferences, and attributes, but an analytically oriented approach had no influence. These findings underscore the need to further examine the differential effects of empathy-versus analytic-focused approaches to the teaching of ethics.     

On the philosophy of psi

In Naming and Necessity, Kripke argues that intuitions about what is possible play a limited, but important, role in challenging philosophical theses, counting as evidence against them only if they cannot be reconstrued as intuitions about something else, compatible with the thesis in question. But he doesn't provide clear guidelines for determining when such intuitions have been successfully reconstrued, leading some to question their status as evidence for modal claims. In this paper I focus on some worries, articulated by Michael Della Rocca, about whether modal intuitions can be evidence for claims about essential properties, and argue that there is a way of viewing the role of modal intuition in philosophical argument that can preserve their evidential force.     

Individual Differences in Child Kaleidoblock Responses

The relationship between self-esteem and parental identification was investigated. The hypothesis that self-esteem is positively correlated with parental identification was supported for female college students by two out of three self-esteem measures. For male subjects one social self-esteem measure correlated negatively with maternal identification and a self-concept measure correlated positively. No relationship between self-esteem and paternal identification existed for males: hence the hypothesis was refuted. The importance of social self-esteem in the feminine self-concept and its basis in parental identification is emphasized in the discussion.     

Construct Validity of the Need to Belong Scale: Mapping the Nomological Network

Nine studies examined the construct validity of the Need to Belong Scale. The desire for acceptance and belonging correlated with, but was distinct from, variables that involve a desire for social contact, such as extraversion and affiliation motivation. Furthermore, need to belong scores were not related to insecure attachment or unfulfilled needs for acceptance. Need to belong was positively correlated with extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism and with having an identity that is defined in terms of social attributes. Need to belong was associated with emotional reactions to rejection, values involving interpersonal relationships, and subclinical manifestations of certain personality disorders.     

True Love Waits: Do Southern Baptists? Premarital Sexual Behavior Among Newly Married Southern Baptist Sunday School Students

This study measures premarital sex prevalence, sources of sex education, and support for secular sex education among 151 newly married young adults surveyed at 9 Texas Southern Baptist churches. More than 70% of respondents reported having had premarital vaginal or oral sex, but more than 80% regretted premarital sex. The proportion of premarital sex exceeded 80% in 6 of 9 churches, among men and women married after age 25 and women married before age 21. School sex education was the only source of information about sexually transmitted infections for 57% of respondents, and 65% supported secular sex education despite church opposition.     

Making the Best of a Bad Situation: Proactive Coping with Racial Discrimination

Proactive coping with racial discrimination takes three forms: self-focused coping, situation-focused coping, and avoidance. Overall, African Americans used self-focused coping more than situation-focused coping or physical avoidance, though there were interesting differences between retrospective recall of racial discrimination and daily reports. Relative to reports during the diary week, when recalling how they typically dealt with racial discrimination, African Americans overestimated their use of situation-focused strategies and underestimated their use of self-focused strategies. For both retrospective and daily reports, proactive coping was positively related to primary appraisals of harm but unrelated to secondary appraisals of resources. African American identification, but not stigma consciousness or optimism, was uniquely associated with proactive coping. We discuss the potential benefits and limitations of proactive coping with racial discrimination.     

Does stress enhance or impair memory consolidation?

Three experiments examined the hypothesis that stress-induced arousal enhances long-term memory for experiences associated with arousing events. Contrary to expectations, in each experiment exposure to a stressor (arm immersion in ice water) interfered with, rather than enhanced, long-term memory for associated material. Despite varying the stimuli (words, pictures), their emotional value (positive, negative, neutral), the time between learning and stress inductions (0 to 1 minute), and opportunities for post-learning rehearsal, each experiment produced a significant reversal of the hypothesised effect. That is, in each experiment, exposure to a stressor interfered with, rather than enhanced, long-term memory for associated material. We conclude that the relationship between stress and memory consolidation is more bounded than previously believed.     

Analysis of play

Abstract

Play has long been considered a useful therapeutic tool when working with children. Even though play is used extensively by psychotherapists of various theoretical persuasions, relatively little is written concerning the nature and therapeutic value of play. In addition, the therapeutic significance of play in psychotherapy with adults is an area that has been neglected and under‐utilized. This paper will address the nature of play and what it is that makes play therapeutic within a conceptual framework derived from psychoanalytic theory, existentialism and phenomenology. In particular, the nature of play and its therapeutic value will be analyzed through three constitutive elements: the paradoxical nature of play, the role of the imagination and the symbolic, and the playful therapist.