On short‐selling the investment theory of creativity: A reply to Runco

In creativity, there is scant evidence of significant racial and gender differences, and when such differences are found, there is no consistency regarding which groups perform best. There has been little work focusing on racial and gender biases and/or stereotypes within creativity assessment. It is study these issues by using a modified version of the Consensual Assessment Technique in which the judges are provided with information about the creators' gender and/or race. A total of 455 undergraduates assigned ratings for creativity, writing ability, and enjoyment to 60 poems downloaded from a poetry Web site. These poems either had no attribution or had (fictional) stereotypical Black, White, and Crossover names for each gender. Results suggest that novice raters using CAT methodology display little evidence of bias in their ratings of creativity, writing ability, and poem enjoyment. Very slight preference was found for poems assigned names of White females.     

Difference Scores in the Identification of Children with Learning Disabilities It's Time to Use a Different Method

In this article, we identify ten reasons why discrepancy scores (based on differences between IQ and reading achievement scores) provide an inadequate means for identifying children with reading disabilities. We recommend instead that children be identified simply on the basis of problems in reading skills, regardless of their IQs.     

Elucidating The Etiology and Nature of Beliefs about Parenting Styles

This study was designed to investigate relationships among self‐reported and spouse‐reported beliefs about parenting styles, the characteristics of the individuals manifesting these styles, and the contextual characteristics of parenting. Demographic characteristics, life circumstances, family functioning, personality traits, ability indices, and parenting‐styles indicators were collected from a sample of 452 women and 293 men, all of whom were raising adolescents in contemporary Russia. Of the families studied, 275 were intact (i.e. consisted of married and cohabiting couples). It was found that individual characteristics and contextual characteristics (e.g. family functioning) together predicted about 20% of the variance in reported beliefs about parental styles of responsiveness and demandingness. Moreover, these variables discriminated about 65% of the parents reporting indulging, neglectful, authoritarian or authoritative beliefs about parenting. The percentage of explained variance doubled when beliefs about parenting styles of partners were placed in the model. Thus, in attempts to understand the etiology of parents’ beliefs about parenting styles, more attention should be given to beliefs about parenting styles of their spouses. It might be that beliefs about parenting styles emerge as a structure shared by spouses; they are mediated, but not solely determined, by the individual characteristics of parents and their children.     

The effects of rapport‐building style on children's reports of a staged event

Three‐ to nine‐year‐old children (n=144) interacted with a photographer and were interviewed about the event either a week or a month later. The informativeness and accuracy of information provided following either open‐ended or direct rapport building were compared. Children in the open‐ended rapport‐building condition provided more accurate reports than children in the direct rapport‐building condition after both short and long delays. Open‐ended rapport‐building led the three‐ to four‐year‐olds to report more errors in response to the first recall question about the event, but they went on to provide more accurate reports in the rest of the interview than counterparts in the direct rapport‐building condition. These results suggest that forensic interviewers should attempt to establish rapport with children using an open‐ended style. Published in 2004 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Unified psychology.

The authors describe an approach to psychology they refer to as unified psychology, which is the multiparadigmatic, multidisciplinary, and integrated study of psychological phenomena through converging operations. In this article, they unpack this definition and explore some of its implications. First, they review some previous efforts to conceive of a unified psychology and consider objections to such an undertaking. Second, they discuss the importance of converging operations for psychology. Third, they consider the need for multidisciplinary and integrated study of psychological phenomena that focuses on the phenomena rather than on particular lines of disciplinary inquiry. Fourth, they ponder the problem of investigators' becoming locked into a single paradigm with its attendant set of presuppositions about psychological theory and research. Fifth, they outline some possible objections to their proposal and respond to them. Finally, they discuss some implications of their views.     

Toward a unified theory of human reasoning

This article presents a unified theory of human reasoning. The goal of the theory is to specify what constitutes reasoning, as opposed to other psychological processes, and to characterize the psychological distinction between inductive and deductive reasoning. The theory views reasoning as the controlled and mediated application of three processes— selective encoding, selective comparison, and selective combination—to inferential rules. The first two of these processes are essentially inductive in nature; the third is essentially deductive. The theory describes these three processes, specifies the kinds of inferential rules and their use in several reasoning tasks, and specifies the mediators that affect how well the processes can be applied to the rules. The theory is shown to apply to a variety of reasoning tasks and is compared to other theories as well.