Openness to experience and creativity: When does global citizenship matter?

The relationship between the openness to experience trait (OTE) and creativity has been well documented in previous research. Likewise, the global citizenship construct has theoretical overlap with both OTE and creativity. We hypothesised global citizenship would make a unique contribution to explaining variance in five types of creativity (self/everyday, scholarly, performance, mechanical/scientific and artistic), above and beyond the contribution of OTE. Participants were predominantly female, European American, traditionally aged college students (N = 407). Global citizenship prosocial outcomes explained unique variance in self/everyday (sr² = .10), scholarly (sr² = .03) and mechanical/scientific (sr² = .03) creativity. Results are discussed in terms of dual processes theories of cognition.     

Taking Time to Incubate: The Moderating Role of ‘What You Do’ and ‘When You Do It’ on Creative Performance

We explore how the choices available to individuals planning multi‐task work can facilitate the incubation of ideas and enhance creative performance. Using opportunistic assimilation theory, we hypothesize that two considerations can determine the effectiveness of incubation and creative performance. First, we argue that having the discretion to switch tasks when needed, as well as the timing of this discretionary switch between tasks (i.e., earlier versus later in the work process on the main task) is important. Second, the scope of the intervening task (i.e., in the same knowledge domain as the main task versus in a different domain) can lead to more effective incubation and creativity. Results of a laboratory study indicate that participants who made a discretionary switch to an intervening task later in their work process on the main task benefited significantly more in terms of creative performance than those who chose to switch earlier in their work process or chose not to switch tasks. Additionally, participants who worked on an in‐domain intervening task exhibited significantly higher creativity on the main task than those who worked on an out‐of‐domain intervening task. Furthermore, focus of attention on the main task partially mediated these results.     

Moral transgression during the Vietnam War: a path analysis of the psychological impact of veterans’ involvement in wartime atrocities

Background and Objectives: Involvement in wartime combat often conveys a number of deleterious outcomes, including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, hostility, aggression, and suicidal ideation. Less studied is the effect of engagement in wartime atrocities, including witnessing and perpetrating abusive violence.

Design and Methods: This study employed path analysis to examine the direct effects of involvement in wartime atrocities on hostility, aggression, depression, and suicidal ideation independent of combat exposure, as well as the indirect effects via guilt and PTSD symptom severity among 603 help-seeking male Vietnam War veterans.

Results: Involvement in wartime atrocities was predictive of increased guilt, PTSD severity, hostility, aggression, depressive symptoms, and suicidal ideation after controlling for overall combat exposure. Combat-related guilt played a minor role in mediating the effect of atrocity involvement on depression and suicidal ideation. PTSD severity had a larger mediational effect. However, it still accounted for less than half of the total effect of involvement in wartime atrocities on hostility, aggression, and suicidal ideation.

Conclusions: These findings highlight the heightened risk conveyed by involvement in wartime atrocities and suggest that the psychological sequelae experienced following atrocity involvement may extend well beyond guilt and PTSD.     

Dealing with Big Numbers: Representation and Understanding of Magnitudes Outside of Human Experience

Being able to estimate quantity is important in everyday life and for success in the STEM disciplines. However, people have difficulty reasoning about magnitudes outside of human perception (e.g., nanoseconds, geologic time). This study examines patterns of estimation errors across temporal and spatial magnitudes at large scales. We evaluated the effectiveness of hierarchical alignment in improving estimations, and transfer across dimensions. The activity was successful in increasing accuracy for temporal and spatial magnitudes, and learning transferred to the estimation of numeric magnitudes associated with events and objects. However, there were also a number of informative differences in performance on temporal, spatial, and numeric magnitude measures, suggesting that participants possess different categorical information for these scales. Educational implications are discussed.     

Spirituality as a 1‐Year Prospective Predictor of Violence Perpetration and Drug Use Among Youth at Continuation High Schools1

This paper presents the results of a 1‐year prospective study of violence perpetration, drug use, and spirituality among continuation high school youth. Spirituality was found to predict later violence perpetration and drug use as a single predictor. However, it failed to predict violence or drug use in models that also entered 6 other variables; particularly, baseline levels of violence and drug use, and morality of drug use. It is possible that current measures of spirituality predict later violence perpetration and drug use as a result of tapping attitudes about morality. Controlling for baseline spirituality, male gender, low morality of drug use, violence perpetration, and drug use predicted later spirituality. Spirituality appears to be affected by drug use and violence, but not the converse. The protective influence of spirituality is not supported, at least as currently measured.     

Accuracy of judging others’ traits and states: Comparing mean levels across tests

Tests of accuracy in interpersonal perception take many forms. Often, such tests use designs and scoring methods that produce overall accuracy levels that cannot be directly compared across tests. Therefore, progress in understanding accuracy levels has been hampered. The present article employed several techniques for achieving score equivalency. Mean accuracy was converted to a common metric, pi [Rosenthal, R., & Rubin, D. B. (1989). Effect size estimation for one-sample multiple-choice-type data: Design, analysis, and meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 106, 332–337] in a database of 109 published results representing tests that varied in terms of scoring method (proportion accuracy versus correlation), content (e.g., personality versus affect), number of response options, item preselection, cue channel (e.g., face versus voice), stimulus duration, and dynamism. Overall, accuracy was midway between guessing level and a perfect score, with accuracy being higher for tests based on preselected than unselected stimuli. When item preselection was held constant, accuracy was equivalent for judging affect and judging personality. However, comparisons must be made with caution due to methodological variations between studies and gaps in the literature.     

A Work-Life Identity Model of Well-Being: Towards a Research Agenda Linking Quality-of-Work-Life (QWL) Programs with Quality of Life (QOL)

QWL is conceptualized in terms of the interface between employee role identities and work resources. QWL programs serve to enhance QOL by (1) providing appropriate work resources to meet the expectations of employee role identities, (2) reducing role conflict in work and non-work life, (3) enhancing multiple role identities, (4) reducing role demands, (5) reducing stress related to work and non-work role identities, and (6) increasing the value of the role identity. We describe a variety of QWL programs related to work life (decentralized organization structures, teamwork, parallel structures, ethical corporate mission and culture, the organization work schedule, etc.) and non-work life (work at home, flextime, compressed work week, part-time work arrangements, job sharing, etc.) and show how they serve to enhance QOL using the language of work-life identity. Doing so helps develop a research agenda based on the work-life identify model.     

Is language necessary for human spatial reorientation? Reconsidering evidence from dual task paradigms

Being able to reorient to the spatial environment after disorientation is a basic adaptive challenge. There is clear evidence that reorientation uses geometric information about the shape of the surrounding space. However, there has been controversy concerning whether use of geometry is a modular function, and whether use of features is dependent on human language. A key argument for the role of language comes from shadowing findings where adults engaged in a linguistic task during reorientation ignored a colored wall feature and only used geometric information to reorient [Hermer-Vazquez, L., Spelke, E., & Katsnelson, A. (1999). Sources of flexibility in human cognition: Dual task studies of space and language. Cognitive Psychology, 39, 3-36]. We report three studies showing: (a) that the results of Hermer-Vazques et al. [Hermer-Vazquez, L., Spelke, E., & Katsnelson, A. (1999). Sources of flexibility in human cognition: Dual task studies of space and language. Cognitive Psychology, 39, 3-36] are obtained in incidental learning but not with explicit instructions, (b) that a spatial task impedes use of features at least as much as a verbal shadowing task, and (c) that neither secondary task impedes use of features in a room larger than that used by Hermer-Vazquez et al. These results suggest that language is not necessary for successful use of features in reorientation. In fact, whether or not there is an encapsulated geometric module is currently unsettled. The current findings support an alternative to modularity; the adaptive combination view hypothesizes that geometric and featural information are utilized in varying degrees, dependent upon the certainty and variance with which the two kinds of information are encoded, along with their salience and perceived usefulness.     

Emotional and informational support from different sources and employee creativity

This study examined relations between employee creativity and emotional and informational support provided by three sources: individuals in the primary work unit, other work‐related individuals and non‐work‐related individuals. I also examined whether openness to experience moderated these relations. Results showed significant relations between creativity and emotional support from primary unit and other work‐related individuals, and informational support from primary unit and non‐work‐related individuals. Emotional support from non‐work‐related individuals had a stronger relation to creativity for employees low on openness to experience than for those high on openness. Implications of these results for organizational research and practice are discussed.