Dealing With Complexity Differently: From Interaction-Dominant Dynamics to Theoretical Plurality

We describe how the work of Guy Van Orden has been deeply influential in a variety of ways and focus on 2 important features: measurement and context. The centrality of these variables in understanding how psychological regularities emerge in our investigative contexts, and evolve into theories, recommends a different way of dealing with complexity. We argue that the Van Orden approach has, as one possible consequence, a plural approach to psychological phenomena. We end by describing what this means for cognitive science.     

Diagnosing Organizational Innovation: Measuring the Capacity for Innovation

Organizational innovation involves reconciling many contradictions or paradoxes. Dividing the process of innovation into phases ranging from Activation to Validation and examining each phase in terms of the six Ps of creativity offers a framework for making sense of these contradictions. The Innovation Phase Assessment Instrument (IPAI) was designed to assess organizations according to such an approach. The scale was administered to 454 student volunteers and an analysis of their responses indicated that the IPAI is highly reliable and has substantial construct validity. At a practical level, it can be used for assessing the strengths/weaknesses of organizations in a differentiated way and for making recommendations for improving their capacity for innovation. It is also a source of research questions for examining creativity and innovation in an organizational context.     

The Interactive Effects of Self‐Perceptions and Job Requirements on Creative Problem Solving

Over the years, researchers have focused on ways to facilitate creativity in the workplace by looking at individual factors and organizational factors that affect employee creativity (Woodman, Sawyer, & Griffin, 1993 ). In many cases, the factors that affect creativity are examined independently. In other words, it is uncommon for researchers to look at the interaction among individual and organizational factors. In this study, it is argued that to get a true understanding of how to maximize creativity in the workplace, organizational researchers must look at the interaction between organizational factors and individual factors that affect employee creativity. More specifically, the current study looked at an individual's perceptions about his or her ability to be creative (i.e., individual factor) and perceptions of requirements for creativity in the workplace (i.e., an organizational factor). The results indicated that individuals who have a high belief about their ability to be creative (an individual factor) were most creative when they also perceived requirements for creativity in the workplace (an organizational factor). Furthermore, individuals who had low perceptions of creative ability were still able to perform creatively when they had high perceptions of requirements for creativity. This suggests that, to maximize creativity, organizations should focus on both individual and organizational factors that affect employee creativity.     

Opening up Openness to Experience: A Four‐Factor Model and Relations to Creative Achievement in the Arts and Sciences

Openness to experience is the broadest personality domain of the Big Five, including a mix of traits relating to intellectual curiosity, intellectual interests, perceived intelligence, imagination, creativity, artistic and aesthetic interests, emotional and fantasy richness, and unconventionality. Likewise, creative achievement is a broad construct, comprising creativity across the arts and sciences. The aim of this study was to clarify the relationship between openness to experience and creative achievement. Toward this aim, I factor analyzed a battery of tests of cognitive ability, working memory, Intellect, Openness, affect, and intuition among a sample of English Sixth Form students (N = 146). Four factors were revealed: explicit cognitive ability, intellectual engagement, affective engagement, and aesthetic engagement. In line with dual‐process theory, each of these four factors showed differential relations with personality, impulsivity, and creative achievement. Affective engagement and aesthetic engagement were associated with creative achievement in the arts, whereas explicit cognitive ability and intellectual engagement were associated with creative achievement in the sciences. The results suggest that the Intellectual and Openness aspects of the broader openness to experience personality domain are related to different modes of information processing and predict different forms of creative achievement.     

Increasing Students' Scientific Creativity: The “Learn to Think” Intervention Program

The “Learn to Think” (LTT) Intervention Program was developed for raising thinking abilities of primary and secondary school students. It has been implemented in more than 300 schools, and more than 200,000 students took part in the experiment over a 10‐year span. Several longitudinal intervention studies showed that LTT could promote the development of students' thinking ability, learning motivation, and learning strategy as well as raise academic performance in primary schools. This article describes a study of the influence and the delayed effects of LTT on the scientific creativity of secondary school students. One hundred and seven students were selected from a secondary school, 54 of them participated in the LTT every 2 weeks and the rest had not. The intervention lasted 2 years, and the delayed effect was explored half a year after terminating the intervention. The Scientific Creativity Test for Secondary School Students was used four times from pre‐test to delayed post‐test. The results indicated that the LTT did promote the development of scientific creativity of secondary school students, and the effects on the scientific creativity were not necessarily immediate, but tended to be long‐lasting.     

Implicit Attitudes as Potential Protection From Risky Sex: Predicting Condom Use With the IAT

The Implicit Association Test (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) has become a popular tool for measuring implicit attitudes toward 2 contrasting concepts. In this study, we suggest including a neutral category (trees) to capture implicit evaluations of a single target attitude object. Using such a technique to measure implicit attitudes toward condoms, we predicted and found that explicit attitudes were related to intended condom use in situations that allow for controlled and deliberative processing, but implicit attitudes were related to intended condom use when automatic processing presides. Implications for such implicit and explicit attitude-behavior relations are discussed in the context of sexual risk-taking.     

Disequilibrium in the mind,disharmony in the body

Although it is generally acknowledged that experiences of frustration, confusion, and anxiety are embodied phenomena, very little is known about how these processes modulate presumably unconscious, but constantly present, subtle bodily movement. We addressed this problem by tracking the low-level dynamics of body movement, using 1/f noise, pink noise, or “fractal scaling”, during naturalistic experiences of affect in two studies involving deep learning and effortful problem-solving. Our results indicate that body movement fluctuations of individuals experiencing cognitive equilibrium was characteristic of correlated pink noise, but there was a whitening of the signal when participants experienced states that are diagnostic of cognitive distress such as anxiety, confusion, and frustration. We orient our findings within theories that emphasise the embodied nature of cognition and affect and with perspectives that view affective and cognitive processes as emergent products of a self-organising dynamical system (the brain) that is inextricably coupled to the body.     

An Exploratory Assessment of Sales Culture Variables: Strategic Implications Within the Banking Industry

Growing, or even simply sustaining, profitability in today's rapidly changing environment is a daunting task. Today's firm must contend with increasing competition, changing customer requirements, and unprecedented technological change. Further, changing government regulations, such as the recent wave of deregulation, have dramatically changed the way business has traditionally been done in certain industries. In such a turbulent environment many firms have discovered that a total organizational sales effort is necessary. For many firms, this means a paradigm shift that involves strengthening their sales culture.

The purpose of this study is to empirically examine the sales culture (SC) concept and discuss its importance in contemporary business strategy. First, we will discuss market orientation from a corporate culture perspective. Second, the sales culture component of a market orientation will be defined and examined. Third, an exploratory investigation of constructs associated with sales culture will be investigated using an example taken from an industry that is experiencing rapid change, the banking industry. Finally, strategic implications, limitations and suggestions for future research will be shared.     

Measuring Narrative Engagement

Research indicates that the extent to which one becomes engaged, transported, or immersed in a narrative influences the narrative's potential to affect subsequent story-related attitudes and beliefs. Explaining narrative effects and understanding the mechanisms responsible depends on our ability to measure narrative engagement in a theoretically meaningful way. This article develops a scale for measuring narrative engagement that is based on a mental models approach to narrative processing. It distinguishes among four dimensions of experiential engagement in narratives: narrative understanding, attentional focus, emotional engagement, and narrative presence. The scale is developed and validated through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses with data from viewers of feature film and television, in different viewing situations, and from two different countries. The scale's ability to predict enjoyment and story-consistent attitudes across different programs is presented. Implications for conceptualizing engagement with narratives as well as narrative persuasion and media effects are discussed.     

Frame-differencing methods for measuring bodily synchrony in conversation

The study of interpersonal synchrony examines how interacting individuals grow to have similar behavior, cognition, and emotion in time. Many of the established methods of analyzing interpersonal synchrony are costly and time-consuming; the study of bodily synchrony has been especially laborious, traditionally requiring researchers to hand-code movement frame by frame. Because of this, researchers have been searching for more efficient alternatives for decades. Recently, some researchers (e.g., Nagaoka & Komori (IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems, 91(6), 1634–1640, 2008); Ramseyer & Tschacher, 2008) have applied computer science and computer vision techniques to create frame-differencing methods (FDMs) to simplify analyses. In this article, we provide a detailed presentation of one such FDM, created by modifying and adding to existing FDMs. The FDM that we present requires little programming experience or specialized equipment: Only a few lines of MATLAB code are required to execute an automated analysis of interpersonal synchrony. We provide sample code and demonstrate its use with an analysis of brief, friendly conversations; using linear mixed-effects models, the measure of interpersonal synchrony was found to be significantly predicted by time lag (p < .001) and by the interaction between time lag and measures of interpersonal liking (p < .001). This pattern of results fits with existing literature on synchrony. We discuss the current limitations and future directions for FDMs, including their use as part of a larger methodology for capturing and analyzing multimodal interaction.