The Influence of Openness to Experience and Organizational Justice on Creativity

Creative performance is a desired organizational outcome that can be influenced by individual differences and contextual factors. An empirical investigation was conducted to study perceptions of organizational justice, an important situational variable, and its influence on individual creative performance. Literature suggests that organizations look to hire individuals who have individual differences that make them more inclined to produce creative outputs; thus, this investigation also sought to determine how openness to experience, a construct known to have a positive relationship with creative performance, might interact with justice perceptions. This investigation uncovered a main effect relationship between procedural justice and creativity, as well as provided evidence that openness to experience moderates the relationship between distributive justice and creativity.     

Unique association of approach motivation and mania vulnerability

Bipolar disorder involves experiences of both mania and depression over time, and measures of mania-risk and depression-risk therefore tend to be correlated, making it difficult to disentangle the shared versus unique aspects of mania and depression vulnerability. In theory, strong approach motivation is uniquely linked with mania risk, but this relation tends to be obscured unless co-occurring depression risk is statistically controlled. In this study, 461 college students completed the General Behaviour Inventory (GBI)—a validated questionnaire of bipolar disorder vulnerability—and they reported their degree of approach motivation in response to four vignettes that varied in relative incentive versus threat strength. After controlling for the effect of depression vulnerability, mania vulnerability was associated with approach motivation, particularly in response to more threatening scenarios, and this association remained significant even when controlling for dispositional threat and incentive responsiveness, current symptoms, mood, self-esteem, and optimism. The results are consistent with models that regard heightened approach motivation as a unique aspect of mania vulnerability.     

Intervening to improve communication between parents, teachers, and primary care providers of children with ADHD or at high risk for ADHD

This study examines interventions designed to improve communication between individuals who take care of children with ADHD. A teacher rating of 6,171 elementary school children identifies 1,573 children with ADHD or with high risk for ADHD. Parent interviews and information from teachers are collected on 243 children who are randomized into treatment and control conditions and followed for 39 months. The interventions consisted of group workshops and single one-on-one tutorials with parents, teachers, and providers about the evaluation and treatment of ADHD that stressed the need for communication between the three parties. There are few significant effects on communication that are short lived. Results suggest that the interventions are insufficient to cause significant increase in communication. Future attempts to improve parent-teacher-provider coordination should be continuing rather than single-session interventions.     

Pronouns in marital interaction

Recent studies in social psychology have found that the frequency of certain words in people's speech and writing is related to psychological aspects of their personal health. We investigated whether counts of "self" and "other" pronouns used by 59 couples engaged in a problem-solving discussion were related to indices of marital health. One spouse in each couple had a diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder or panic disorder with agoraphobia; 50% of the patients and 40% of their spouses reported marital dissatisfaction. Regardless of patients' diagnostic status, spouses who used more second-person pronouns were more negative during interactions, whereas those who used more first-person plural pronouns produced more positive problem solutions, even when negative behavior was statistically controlled. Moreover, use of first-person singular pronouns was positively associated with marital satisfaction. These findings suggest that pronouns used by spouses during conflict-resolution discussions provide insight into the quality of their interactions and marriages.     

Recognizing one's own face

We report two studies of facial self-perception using individually tailored, standardized facial photographs of a group of volunteers and their partners. A computerized morphing procedure was used to merge each target face with an unknown control face. In the first set of experiments, a discrimination task revealed a delayed response time for the more extensively morphed self-face stimuli. In a second set of experiments, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to measure brain activation while subjects viewed morphed versions of either their own or their partner's face, alternating in blocks with presentation of an unknown face. When subjects viewed themselves (minus activation for viewing an unknown face), increased blood oxygenation was detected in right limbic (hippocampal formation, insula, anterior cingulate), left prefrontal cortex and superior temporal cortex. In the partner (versus unknown) experiment, only the right insula was activated. We suggest that a neural network involving the right hemisphere in conjunction with left-sided associative and executive regions underlies the process of visual self-recognition. Together, this combination produces the unique experience of self-awareness.     

A view of the world through the bat's ear: the formation of acoustic images in echolocation

Echolocating bats perceive objects as acoustic images derived from echoes of the ultrasonic sounds they emit. They can detect, track, identify, and intercept flying insects using sonar. Many species, such as the big brown bat, Eptesicus fuscus, emit frequency-modulated sonar sounds and perceive the distance to targets, or target range, from the delay of echoes. For Eptesicus, a point-target's image has a sharpness along the range axis that is determined by the acuity of echo-delay perception, which is about 10 ns under favorable conditions. The image as a whole has a fine range structure that corresponds to the cross-correlation function between emissions and echoes. A complex target- which has reflecting points, called "glints", located at slightly different distances and reflects echoes containing overlapping components with slightly different delays--is perceived in terms of its range profile. The separation of the glints along the range dimension is encoded by the shape of the echo spectrum created by interference between overlapping echo components. However, Eptesicus transforms the echo spectrum back into an estimate of the original delay separation of echo components. The bat thus converts spectral cues into elements of an image expressed in terms of range. The absolute range of the nearest glint is encoded by the arrival time of the earliest echo component, and the spectrally encoded range separation of additional glints is referred to this time-encoded reference range for the image as a whole. Each individual glint is represented by a cross-correlation function for its own echo component, the nearest of which is computed directly from arrival-time measurements while further ones are computed by transformation of the echo spectrum. The bat then sums the cross-correlation functions for multiple glints to form the entire image of the complex target. Range and shape are two distinct features of targets that are separately encoded by the bat's auditory system, but the bat perceives unitary images that require fusion of these features to create a synthetic psychological dimension of range. The bat's use of cross-correlation-like images reveals neural computations that achieve fusion of stimulus features and offers an example of high-level operations involved in the formation of perceptual "wholes".     

Self-reports of eating behavior, goals, imagery, and health status: principal components and sex differences

University students (N = 208) completed a questionnaire on four aspects of eating: behavior, goals, imagery, and health status. A principal components analysis of the 18 self-report variables identified six factors: Weight Control Failure, Sensory Awareness of Food and Eating, Stable Eating Pattern, Unrestrained Overeating, "Home Cooking and Good Digestion," and Environmental Indifference. Sex differences in self-reporting were statistically significant on 10 of the 18 variables, with 6 of those significant variables heavily loaded on the first factor: Weight Control Failure. Analysis of these variables suggests that women report eating to be more problematic than do men. Several of the aspects of self-reports are discussed, including the apparent independence of sensory awareness of food and eating from self-reports of behavior, goals, and health status.     

Reduction of unsafe eating in a patient with esophageal stricture.

Previous research has demonstrated the efficacy of behavioral interventions in teaching self-feeding skills as well as in reducing inappropriate self-feeding behavior. The purpose of this study was to extend previous research on the use of prompting and reinforcement in reducing unsafe eating behaviors to the treatment of an adolescent with developmental disabilities and esophageal stricture. A behavioral assessment and treatment using prompting and reinforcement were shown to be effective in decreasing bite rate, decreasing bite size, and increasing the number of chews per bite.