Developing a Scale to Measure the Creative Environment Perceptions: A Questionnaire for Investigating Garden Variety Creativity

A scale is presented to measure worker creative environment perceptions. The scale has good measurement properties, is brief enough for easy administration, and can be used on a wide range of garden variety creativity workers. Structural equation modeling testing of the underlying factor structure showed 3 significantly interrelated latent variables—creativity support, work characteristics, and creativity blocks. This finding indicated that managers should improve all aspects of their organizations' creative environment in order to maximize worker creative output.     

The Effects of Subject-and Experimenter-Induced Defensive Response Sets on Picture-Frustration Test Reactions

Thirty male college students, half scoring high and half low on the MMPI K-scale, were administered a multiple-choice (M-C) modification of the Rosenzweig P-F Study under three instructional sets. Two of these sets were induced by E and compared with the third which represented S's normal test-taking set. The two induced sets included (1) a “should” set in which concern for the social consequences of behavior was accentuated, and (2) a “wish” set in which concern for social consequences was minimized, and freedom of self-expression was accentuated.

It was hypothesized that Ss making extremely high or low scores on the K-scale would likewise score differently on the M-C, P-F test. High K, defined by its authors as a measure of test defensiveness, and low K, as test-taking candidness, would be associated with P-F score patterns reflecting these test-taking attitudes: High K Ss showing Impunitive (M) dominant reaction patterns and low K showing Extrapunitive (E) or Intropunitive (I) dominant patterns. These hypothèses were confirmed except that intropunitive responses were extremely rare in the entire subject sample.

It was further hypothesized that the typical high K pattern would be induced in low K Ss under the “should” instructional set and the low K pattern would be elicited from high K Ss under “wish” instructions. This expectation was confirmed. It was suggested that the technique of manipulating responses via test taking instructions can generate correction factors useful in projective as well as structured personality tests.     

Direction of association between targets in a RSVP task influences priming at very short but not long SOAs

When two targets are presented using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) and the interval between the targets is 200–500 ms, detection or identification of the second target is impaired. This impairment in second target report is known as the attentional blink (AB). This study sought to examine the impact of the direction of target association on priming during an AB task using very short and long SOAs. Two experiments were conducted using dual-stream RSVP tasks and targets that either shared an associative relationship or were unrelated to one another. The direction of association between the targets was also varied so that associatively related targets were presented in the forward (strongest association from target 1 to target 2) or backward directions of association (strongest association from target 2 to target 1). In Experiment 1 very short SOAs between targets (27–213 ms) were used. Priming was evident at the same SOAs for both targets presented in the backward direction of association. However, for targets presented in the forward direction of association, priming occurred for target 1 and target 2 at different SOAs. Experiment 2 used longer SOAs between targets (107 to 535 ms) and it was determined that while direction of association between the targets did not affect priming, there was a larger priming effect for target 2 than for target 1. The results of the two experiments indicate that direction of association between targets influences priming in RSVP tasks that use very short but not long SOAs. The results are discussed in relation to the two-stage response competition model of Potter et al. (J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 28:1149–1162, 2002).     

Activation of Political Attitudes: A Psychophysiological Examination of the Hot Cognition Hypothesis

The recording of event-related potentials (ERPs) in the brain has allowed for a better understanding of human sensory and cognitive processing. This technique may also prove useful in studying implicit social attitudes and their effects on information processing. Here, ERPs were used in a study of "hot cognition" in the context of political concepts. Hot cognition, as applied to the political domain, posits that all sociopolitical concepts that have been evaluated in the past are affectively charged, and that this affective charge is automatically activated from long-term memory within milliseconds of presentation of the political stimulus. During an evaluative priming task, ERP recordings showed that affectively incongruent prime/target pairs elicited an enhanced negativity with a peak latency of about 400 milliseconds relative to affectively congruent prime/target pairs. These differences suggest that automatic, implicit evaluations were made in response to strongly positive and negative political stimuli, and that these evaluations affected the subsequent processing of a high-valence adjective. Therefore, it appears that the emotional valence of a political prime is stored along with the concept itself, and that an affective response becomes active upon mere exposure to the political stimulus.     

Competing responses and the processing of irrelevant information

A number of studies have shown that performance of identification and discrimination tasks is detrimentally affected by irrelevant information, yet other studies have failed to find such decrements. It is suggested that these contradictory findings depend on whether S must make difficult discriminations among the relevant stimuli, the irrelevant stimuli, or between the relevant and irrelevant stimuli. The role of irrelevant information in these tasks is to enhance or amplify the competihg responses engendered by the difficult discriminations. Irrelevant information enhances competing responses by increasing the information processing requirements of a task. The results of various studies of irrelevant information seem to be in good agreement with the assertions.     

The minister and the birth of a defective child

Summary There now exists a gap in the humanistic and professional care of the newborn defective child and his family—a gap which is so vital that it further adds to the debilitation of the infant and increases force behind the statement, The family with a handicapped child is a handicapped family. The minister in the community is the logical person by reasons of training, sphere of call, and availability to fill this void and assist parents through this most difficult shock or mourning period.In times of death or severe illness, the family minister does not wait to be called by the family before showing his, and the church's, concern. Neither should he wait in the case of defective birth, for no longer is this a subject to be hidden in closets while parents suffer in agonized self-accusation. The very first days are crucial ones, and the minister that makes himself available to the parents during that time in a supportive, listening post role will produce more positive results than will many sessions of counseling in the later years of that infant's childhood.