Conceptualizing Creativity: General and Cultural Biases in Gough's Creative Personality Scale

This study analyzes the validity of Gough's Creative Personality Scale (CPS) for the Adjective Check List (ACL) by using 1773 Swiss, South Korean, and Mainland Chinese students as a sample. Four sources of potential bias were identified in Gough's CPS, two of which are general and two cultural in nature. The two general biases were investigated by conducting correlation analyses and evaluating alternative scoring methods for the CPS. As a result of the first bias, checking a large number of adjectives was found to be more important for achieving a high score than checking the relevant ones. Due to the second bias, the CPS score mostly depends on the number of positive adjectives checked while negative items have little impact. The two cultural biases were analyzed using an implicit version of the CPS (iCPS) and factor analysis. The latter revealed three different clusters of creativity type: exploratory‐type, socially responsible‐type, and intellectual‐type creativity. Based on cultural background, they are all weighted differently, causing a potential experiential bias in the CPS. Findings indicate that in South Korea and Mainland China socially responsible‐type creativity dominates whereas in Switzerland exploratory‐type creativity prevails. Findings from the iCPS suggest the second cultural bias, the socially desirable responding bias arising from differences in responding styles among the three cultures.     

Observers can voluntarily shift their psychometric functions without losing sensitivity

Psychometric sensory discrimination functions are usually modeled by cumulative Gaussian functions with just two parameters, their central tendency (μ) and their slope (1/σ). These correspond to Fechner's "constant" and "variable" errors, respectively. Fechner pointed out that even the constant error could vary over space and time and could masquerade as variable error. We wondered whether observers could deliberately introduce a constant error into their performance without loss of precision. In three-dot vernier and bisection tasks with the method of single stimuli, observers were instructed to favour one of the two responses when unsure of their answer. The slope of the resulting psychometric function was not significantly changed, despite a significant change in central tendency. Similar results were obtained when altered feedback was used to induce bias. We inferred that observers can adopt artificial response criteria without any significant increase in criterion fluctuation. These findings have implications for some studies that have measured perceptual "illusions" by shifts in the psychometric functions of sophisticated observers.     

Alteration of cingulate long-term plasticity and behavioral sensitization to inflammation by environmental enrichment

Exposure to an enriched environment (EE) has been shown to induce cortical plasticity. Considerable amount of research is focused on the effects of EE in the hippocampus; however, effects of EE on other brain regions and the mechanisms involved are not well known. To investigate this, we induced cortical plasticity by placing mice in an EE for one month and measured the effects of EE in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Here, we show that EE enhanced the expression of the plasticity gene, egr-1, in the ACC of EE animals accompanied by enhanced cingulate long-term potentiation (LTP) and decreased cingulate long-term depression (LTD). The increased NMDA receptor NR2B/NR2A subunits current ratio is associated with the plasticity seen in the ACC while total protein levels remain unchanged. Furthermore, behavioral experiments show that these mice exposed to EE demonstrate enhanced responses to acute and long-term inflammation. Our findings suggest that exposure to EE alters physiological properties within the ACC which results in enhanced responses to inflammation.     

Evaluating the invariance and validity of the structure of dysfunctional attitudes in an adolescent population

Form A of the Dysfunctional Attitude Scale (DAS-A), a self-report measure of depressive beliefs, is widely used to test Beck's cognitive model of depression. The present study is the first to evaluate the DAS-A factor structure in an adolescent population of 542 high school juniors and the first to examine a hierarchical model. Findings support the existence of a hierarchical structure consisting of two conceptually meaningful group factors (Dysfunctional Attitudes About Achievement and Dysfunctional Attitudes About Needing Approval), a method factor consisting of reverse-worded items, and a general factor, which accounts for 65% of the variance in total scores. The general factor is related to sociotropy, autonomy, and neuroticism, whereas the Dysfunctional Attitudes About Achievement and Dysfunctional Attitudes About Needing Approval factors demonstrate convergent and discriminant validity with respect to autonomy and sociotropy. The structure displays partial metric invariance in female and male students as well as in Caucasian and Non-Caucasian students.     

What does the dominant eye dominate? A brief and somewhat contentious review

We examine a set of implicit and explicit claims about the concept of eye dominance that have been made over the years and note that the new literature on eye dominance does not reflect the old literature from the first half of the last century. We argue that the visual and oculomotor function of the dominant eye--defined by such criteria as asymmetry in acuity, rivalry, or sighting--remains unknown and that the usefulness of the concept for understanding its function is yet to be determined. We suggest that the sighting-dominant eye is the eye used for monocular tasks and has no unique functional role in vision.     

The politics of situating knowledge: An exercise in social epistemology

This essay forges links between Popperians and feminists by considering the connections between Donna Haraway's situated knowledge and Karl R. Popper's situational logic. It is concerned with the political commitments behind methodological issues, with the degree to which there can be a Popperian contribution to the feminist vision of a successor science, and with ways of dealing with, while not resolving, the political differences between socialist feminists and libertarian Popperians.     

The relationship between eye position and egocentric visual direction

Hering’s model of egocentric visual direction assumes implicitly that the effect of eye position on direction is both linear and equal for the two eyes; these two assumptions were evaluated in the present experiment. Five subjects pointed (open-loop) to the apparent direction of a target seen under conditions in which the position of one eye was systematically varied while the position of the other eye was held constant. The data were analyzed through examination of the relationship between the variations in perceived egocentric direction and variations inexpected egocentric direction based on the positions of the varying eye. The data revealed that the relationship between eye position and egocentric direction is indeed linear. Further, the data showed that, for some subjects, variations in the positions of the two eyes do not have equateffectsTjn egocentric direction. Both the between-eye differences and the linear relationship may be understood in terms of individual differences in the location of the cyclopean eye, an unequal weighting of the positions of the eyes in the processing of egocentric direction, or some combination of these two factors.