Productive and Re‐productive Thinking in Solving Insight Problems

Many innovations in organizations result when people discover insightful solutions to problems. Insightful problem‐solving was considered by Gestalt psychologists to be associated with productive, as opposed to re‐productive, thinking. Productive thinking is characterized by shifts in perspective which allow the problem solver to consider new, sometimes transformational, approaches. Re‐productive thinking, on the other hand, involves the application of familiar, routine, procedures. This article reports a study which investigated how self‐reported productive and re‐productive thinking are related to an individual's ability to solve insight problems. Our measures were tested against the Kirton Adaption‐Innovation Inventory (KAI), and a battery of spatial insight problems. The results indicated that productive and re‐productive thinking and the KAI were successful in predicting performance on spatial insight problems. Furthermore, the measures of productive and re‐productive thinking accounted for spatial insight performance independently of scores on the KAI. In addition, the results suggested that re‐productive thinking consists of two different components—one based on group conventions and the other on personal experience. Each contributed differently to solving insight problems.     

Restorative effects of virtual nature settings

Previous research regarding the potential benefits of exposing individuals to surrogate nature (photographs and videos) has found that such immersion results in restorative effects such as increased positive affect, decreased negative affect, and decreased stress. In the current experiment, we examined whether immersion in a virtual computer-generated nature setting could produce restorative effects. Twenty-two participants were equally divided between two conditions, while controlling for gender. In each condition, participants performed a stress-induction task, and were then immersed in virtual reality (VR) for 10 minutes. The control condition featured a slide show in VR, and the nature experimental condition featured an active exploration of a virtual forest. Participants in the nature condition were found to exhibit increased positive affect and decreased stress after immersion in VR when compared to those in the control condition. The results suggest that immersion in virtual nature settings has similar beneficial effects as exposure to surrogate nature. These results also suggest that VR can be used as a tool to study and understand restorative effects.     

Anomalous global effects induced by ‘blind’ distractors in visual hemifield defects

Previous research has revealed that a stimulus presented in the blind visual field of participants with visual hemifield defects can evoke oculomotor competition, in the absence of awareness. Here we studied three cases to determine whether a distractor in a blind hemifield would be capable of inducing a global effect, a shift of saccade endpoint when target and distractor are close to each other, in participants with lesions of the optic radiations or striate cortex. We found that blind field distractors significantly shifted saccadic endpoints in two of three participants with lesions of either the striate cortex or distal optic radiations. The direction of the effect was paradoxical, however, in that saccadic endpoints shifted away from blind field distractors, whereas endpoints shifted towards distractors in the visible hemifields, which is the normal global effect. These results provide further evidence that elements presented in the blind visual field can generate modulatory interactions in the oculomotor system, which may differ from interactions in normal vision.     

Father Involvement and Young,Rural African American Men’s Engagement in Substance Misuse and Multiple Sexual Partnerships

This study was designed to examine the associations of biological father and social father involvement during childhood with African American young men’s development and engagement in risk behaviors. With a sample of 505 young men living in the rural South of the United States, a dual mediation model was tested in which retrospective reports of involvement from biological fathers and social fathers were linked to young men’s substance misuse and multiple sexual partnerships through men’s relational schemas and future expectations. Results from structural equation modeling indicated that levels of involvement from biological fathers and social fathers predicted young men’s relational schemas; only biological fathers’ involvement predicted future expectations. In turn, future expectations predicted levels of substance misuse, and negative relational schemas predicted multiple sexual partnerships. Biological fathers’ involvement evinced significant indirect associations with young men’s substance misuse and multiple sexual partnerships through both schemas and expectations; social fathers’ involvement exhibited an indirect association with multiple sexual partnerships through relational schemas. Findings highlight the unique influences of biological fathers and social fathers on multiple domains of African American young men’s psychosocial development that subsequently render young men more or less likely to engage in risk behaviors.     

The Pathway Toward Clinical Self Confidence

This study was designed to determine the most common pathway toward the development of clinical self-confidence for therapists during the first year of client contact. Telephone interviews were conducted with 39 recent graduates of a master's level marriage and family therapy program. Subjects were asked to graph their development of clinical self-confidence over the first 12 months of their clinical experience. Results reveal a three-stage model of therapist development. The implications for training within each stage of development are identified with an emphasis on the role of the supervisor.     

THERAPIST DEFENSIVENESS AND MARITAL THERAPY PROCESS AND OUTCOME

Abstract

This study examined the effect of couple socioeconomic status (SES); pretherapy marital adjustment; and therapist, husband, and wife defensiveness during the third session of marital therapy on posttherapy marital adjustment. Participants were 22 therapists and 88 couples. Each therapist treated 4 couples, 2 from the middle SES level and 2 from the lower SES level. Path analyses revealed that for husbands higher marital satisfaction before therapy was associated with higher adjustment at the end of therapy, but defensive therapist behavior during therapy was associated with lower posttherapy adjustment. A similar pattern was found for wives, but this should be interpreted with caution owing to potential dependencies in the wives' posttherapy adjustment scores. Neither SES nor pretherapy adjustment predicted therapist defensive behavior in therapy, and SES did not predict marital therapy outcome variance. Results suggest that therapist defensive behavior may reflect a style or characteristic of some marital therapists.     

The effects of face inversion on the perception of long-range and local spatial relations in eye and mouth configuration

A recent study hypothesized a configurational anisotropy in the face inversion effect, with vertical relations more difficult to process. However, another difference in the stimuli of that report was that the vertical but not horizontal shifts lacked local spatial references. Difficulty processing long-range spatial relations might also be predicted from a relevance-interaction explanation, which proposes that in inverted faces, spatial relations are processed efficiently only within high-relevance local regions. The authors performed 2 experiments to distinguish between these hypotheses. Experiment 1 showed that the inversion effect for vertical shifts of the eyes alone was more similar to that for horizontal eye shifts than for vertical shifts of the eyes and eyebrows. In Experiment 2, focused attention reduced the inversion effect for vertical mouth position more than that for vertical shifts of the eyes and brows. The authors concluded that face inversion impairs the perception of both local spatial relations in low-relevance regions and long-range spatial relations extending across multiple facial regions, consistent with a loss of efficient whole-face processing of the spatial relations between features.     

Structure and function in acquired prosopagnosia: Lessons from a series of 10 patients with brain damage

Acquired prosopagnosia varies in both behavioural manifestations and the location and extent of underlying lesions. We studied 10 patients with adult‐onset lesions on a battery of face‐processing tests. Using signal detection methods, we found that discriminative power for the familiarity of famous faces was most reduced by bilateral occipitotemporal lesions that involved the fusiform gyri, and better preserved with unilateral right‐sided lesions. Tests of perception of facial structural configuration showed severe deficits with lesions that included the right fusiform gyrus, whether unilateral or bilateral. This deficit was most consistent for eye configuration, with some patients performing normally for mouth configuration. Patients with anterior temporal lesions had better configuration perception, though at least one patient showed a more subtle failure to integrate configural data from different facial regions. Facial imagery, an index of facial memories, was severely impaired by bilateral lesions that included the right anterior temporal lobe and marginally impaired by fusiform lesions alone; unilateral right fusiform lesions tended to spare imagery for facial features. These findings suggest that (1) prosopagnosia is more severe with bilateral than unilateral lesions, indicating a minor contribution of the left hemisphere to face recognition, (2) perception of facial configuration critically involves the right fusiform gyrus and (3) access to facial memories is most disrupted by bilateral lesions that also include the right anterior temporal lobe. This supports assertions that more apperceptive variants of prosopagnosia are linked to fusiform damage, whereas more associative variants are linked to anterior temporal damage. Next, we found that behavioural indices of covert recognition correlated with measures of overt familiarity, consistent with theories that covert behaviour emerges from the output of damaged neural networks, rather than alternative pathways. Finally, to probe the face specificity of the prosopagnosic defect, we tested recognition of fruits and vegetables: While face specificity was not found in most of our patients, the data of one patient suggested that this may be possible with more focal lesions of the right fusiform gyrus.     

Profiles of everyday executive function in acquired and developmental disorders.

Executive function profiles were examined within and between several clinical disorders via the multi-domain Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function (BRIEF; Gioia, Isquith, Guy, & Kenworthy, 2000). Parent ratings of children with Inattentive and Combined types of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD-I, ADHD-C), Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD), moderate and severe Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), and Reading Disabilities (RD) were compared with controls. Profile analysis revealed significant (p<.01) and substantial (eta2>.10) differences in global elevations and in profile of scale elevations between diagnostic groups. ASD, ADHD-I and ADHD-C groups exhibited greater elevations across the BRIEF scales than did RD and Severe TBI groups, who were in turn more elevated than Moderate TBI and Control groups. The ADHD-C group was unique in its frequency and severity of inhibitory deficits, while the ASD group was distinguishable by its deficits in flexibility. Within diagnostic groups, relative risk for executive dysfunction was calculated with variability present in the frequency of clinically elevated scales. While the BRIEF captures executive profiles characteristic of specific disorders in the clinical setting, it is not diagnostic in its own right and is best used within the context of a broad based evaluation.