On Being Moved by Art: How Reading Fiction Transforms the Self

An experiment tested the hypothesis that art can cause significant changes in the experience of one's own personality traits under laboratory conditions. After completing a set of questionnaires, including the Big-Five Inventory (BFI) and an emotion checklist, the experimental group read the short story The Lady With the Toy Dog by Chekhov, while the control group read a comparison text that had the same content as the story, but was documentary in form. The comparison text was controlled for length, readability, complexity, and interest level. Participants then completed again the BFI and emotion checklist, randomly placed within a larger set of questionnaires. The results show the experimental group experienced significantly greater change in self-reported experience of personality traits than the control group, and that emotion change mediated the effect of art on traits. Further consideration should be given to the role of art in the facilitation of processes of personality growth and maturation.     

Errors and Understanding: The Effects of Error-Management Training on Creative Problem-Solving

People make errors in their creative problem-solving efforts. The intent of this article was to assess whether error-management training would improve performance on creative problem-solving tasks. Undergraduates were asked to solve an educational leadership problem known to call for creative thought where problem solutions were scored for quality, originality, and elegance. Prior to beginning work on their problem solutions, participants were provided with training in 0 to 4 error-management strategies. It was found that error-management training was beneficial for talented people (as indicated by scores on the pretraining exercise) resulting in solutions of greater originality. The implications of these findings for improving performance on creative problem-solving tasks are discussed.     

Stress and Well-Being Among Parents of Children with Potocki-Lupski Syndrome

Potocki-Lupski syndrome (PTLS) or duplication 17p11.2 syndrome is a newly characterized condition causing a variety of health problems with variable severity, including failure to thrive in infancy and childhood, hypotonia, structural heart anomalies, cognitive impairments, speech and learning difficulties, and autism. Due to its recent clinical characterization little is known about the psychosocial impact of this condition on patients and their families. This study evaluated whether parental psychosocial outcomes were associated with children’s PTLS disease severity. Parents of 58 children with PTLS completed a cross-sectional survey that assessed parental stress, quality of life, and coping skills. Parental functioning was associated with greater severity of feeding difficulty and with lower severity of a cardiovascular defect. Findings from this study highlight potential support needs of parents of children affected by PTLS and suggest ways in which these needs may be addressed.     

The Beck Depression Inventory: Item Order and the Impact of Response Sets

The lack of subtle content in the item groups of the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and the consistency in the ordering of the items from least to most pathological make this instrument unduly susceptible to either defensive or malingering response sets. Two experimental forms were developed for the BDI: a backwards version (a simple reversal of the order of items within each group) and a random-order version. These forms, together with the original item order, were given to college undergraduate women along with the Depression scale from the MMPI and the Burks-Martin Questionnaire covering recent life changes and current stressful situations. The random order BDI results in a significantly higher depression score than did either the original or backwards version. Correlations with the other instruments were comparable for all three forms. The random order of items within each set appears to break up a response set to endorse either the first or last item and is, therefore, recommended.     

Perceptual Robustness of the Nonrelationship Between Psychopathology and Popular Responses on the Hand Test and the Rorschach

A Hand Test Popular response is developed using 106 normal subjects and Rorschach's traditional "one-in-three" criterion. Six popular responses were derived. Neither the newly established Hand Test Popular response nor the Korschach Popular discriminated psychosis from nonpsychosis. but as expected, Rorschach X+% and Rorschach WSum6 were significant, and the Hand Test Bizarre (BIZ) score approached significance. Both the Rorschach Popular and the newly developed Hand Test Popular await further elucidation.     

Brief Book,Software, and Test Announcements

After reviewing literature detailing the ubiquity of error in research and assessment data, I describe mistakes found with MMPI-2 and Rorschach scores in an earlier publication (Meyer, 1993). The mistakes emerged from several sources, including hand-scoring the assessment measures, manually retrieving scores from patient files, and manually entering information for statistical analyses. The proportion of erroneous scores in the original study (MMPI-2 = 5.88%, Rorschach = 1.56%) was relatively small and reliability coefficients between the original and corrected scales were uniformly high (i.e., > .940). Consequently, the findings detailed in the original publication were not greatly affected by the mistakes that were made. Nonetheless, because this will not always be the case, I discuss the discrepancies as a way to sensitize researchers, clinicians, and students to the presence of error and then suggest several strategies for minimizing its impact on assessment data and research.     

A new look at time and eternity

In his Systematic Theology, Vol. III, Wolfhart Pannenberg argues that God as eternal comprehends the different moments of time simultaneously and orders them to constitute a whole or totality. The author contends that this approach to time and eternity might solve the logical tension between the classical notion of divine sovereignty and the common sense belief in creaturely spontaneity/human freedom. For, if the existence of the events constituting a temporal sequence is primarily due to the spontaneous decisions of creatures, and if their being ordered into a totality or meaningful whole is primarily due to the superordinate activity of God, then both God and creatures play indispensable but nevertheless distinct roles in the cosmic process.     

Influence of Source Liking and Personality Traits on Perceptions of Bias and Future News Source Selection

This study examined news selection intentions that followed judgments of story bias and the extent to which those intentions were influenced by source liking. The study also examined the extent to which two personality traits, argumentativeness and need for cognition, affected perceptions of story bias and intent to select an offending source in the future. Participants were more likely to say they would return to the source of a “biased” story if they liked and had selected the source previously than they were if the source was unknown. Individuals high in argumentativeness were less likely than those low in argumentativeness to view a story with negative information about their group as biased. Need for cognition was weakly related to intent to return to an offending source. Implications for consumption of counterattitudinal information and source selection in the current news environment are discussed.     

The benefits of self-forgiveness on mental health: Evidence from correlational and experimental research

Previous research on self-forgiveness is mixed. Some argue self-forgiveness may have a salutary influence on mental health problems following an offense, whereas others suggest it may provide an excuse to reoffend. In two studies, we provide correlational and experimental evidence for the salutary effects of self-forgiveness following an offense. In Study 1 (N = 100), self-forgiveness was associated with lower levels of disordered eating behavior. In Study 2 (N = 462), participants recalled a drinking-related transgression, and were randomly assigned to a self-forgiveness or neutral priming condition. Results revealed that participants in the self-forgiveness condition reported significantly more self-forgiving beliefs and fewer feelings of remorse and self-condemnation than participants in the neutral priming condition to the degree that participants believed their drinking was the cause of the offense. These findings highlight the salutary effects of self-forgiveness.