Within-person relationships between mood and creativity

State mood has been proposed as a facilitator of creative behavior. Whereas positive mood compared to neutral mood generally facilitates creative performance, mood effects are weaker and less consistent when positive mood is compared to negative mood. These inconsistent results may be due to focusing only on mood valence, while neglecting or confounding mood activation. The current study is based on the dual-pathway model, which describes separate roles for mood valence and mood activation in facilitating creativity. We used experience sampling methodology to investigate the concurrent and lagged effects of mood valence and activation on creative process engagement (CPE) within-person over time among individuals working on a long-term project requiring creativity. We also investigated the moderating effects of individual differences in goal orientation and supervisory support on within-person mood-creativity relationships. As expected, we found that activating positive and activating negative moods were positively associated with concurrent CPE, whereas deactivating moods of both valences were negatively related to CPE. Activating negative mood had a significant lagged effect on CPE, whereas activating positive mood did not. We also found that activating positive mood was more strongly related to concurrent CPE among individuals with high rather than low learning goal orientation. Further, activating positive mood interacted with prove goal orientation and supervisory support for creativity, such that activating positive mood had the strongest association with CPE when both prove goal orientation and supervisory support were high.     

Attitudes toward immigrants: The interactive role of the authoritarian predisposition,social norms,and humanitarian values

This investigation tested whether social norms and endorsement of humanitarian values interact to influence authoritarians' attitudes toward immigrants. Oyamot, Borgida, and Fisher (2006) found correlational evidence for a model in which: (1) clear social norms for attitudes toward an outgroup (favorable or unfavorable) influence the authoritarianism–attitude relationship in the direction of the norm, and (2) in the absence of clear social norms, endorsement of humanitarian–egalitarian values attenuate the intolerant tendencies of authoritarians. The current investigation tested the model in a survey experiment conducted in a diverse adult sample (N = 388). We measured participants' levels of authoritarian predisposition and endorsement of humanitarian values. Participants were then randomly told that Americans in general had either negative, positive, or mixed opinions about immigrants and immigration (social norm condition), and then asked about their attitude toward immigrants. Consistent with the model, authoritarianism was negatively related to attitudes toward immigrants in the negative norm condition. However, authoritarians' tendency toward intolerance was attenuated when they thought that Americans in general had positive opinions about immigrants. Also as predicted, when societal norms were depicted as mixed, authoritarians' attitudes depended upon endorsement of humanitarian values: humanitarian authoritarians held positive attitudes and non-humanitarian authoritarians held the most negative attitudes toward immigrants. Implications for understanding the effects of authoritarian predispositions in varying social contexts are discussed.     

Initial development of a brief measure of psychological distress

This paper addresses the preliminary development, construct validity, and psychometric properties of a brief self-report measure of psychological distress. 40 items were originally generated by doctoral level psychologists for use in the preliminary clinical sample. Inpatients from a psychiatric unit (N = 125) completed the items, and a principal-components analysis with a direct oblimin rotation was used to evaluate construct validity. The study indicated a four-factor solution, using the constructs of Depression, Hopelessness, Anxiety, and Anger, with good estimates of reliability. After evaluation of factor structure, item analyses, and reliability estimates, a redacted 19-item scale was identified.     

The attentional processes underlying impaired inhibition of threat in anxiety: the remote distractor effect

The current study explored the proposition that anxiety is associated with impaired inhibition of threat. Using a modified version of the remote distractor paradigm, we considered whether this impairment is related to attentional capture by threat, difficulties disengaging from threat presented within foveal vision, or difficulties orienting to task-relevant stimuli when threat is present in central, parafoveal and peripheral locations in the visual field. Participants were asked to direct their eyes towards and identify a target in the presence and absence of a distractor (an angry, happy or neutral face). Trait anxiety was associated with a delay in initiating eye movements to the target in the presence of central, parafoveal and peripheral threatening distractors. These findings suggest that elevated anxiety is linked to difficulties inhibiting task-irrelevant threat presented across a broad region of the visual field.     

Metacognitive therapy in treatment-resistant depression: a platform trial

Patients with treatment-resistant depression received up to 8 sessions of metacognitive therapy (MCT) targeting attentional control, rumination, worry, and metacognitive beliefs. A baseline period was followed by weekly sessions with follow-up assessments at 6 and 12 months post treatment. Large and statistically significant improvements occurred in all symptom measures at post treatment and were maintained over follow-up. Two out of 3 process measures significantly improved at post treatment and all of these measures were improved at follow-up. Treatment was associated with similar response rates on the BDI and Hamilton rating scale. Using liberal criteria 80% of completers were classified as recovered at post treatment and 70% at follow-up on the BDI. In the intention to treat sample 66.6% were recovered at post treatment and 58.3% at follow-up. More stringent criteria showed 60% recovery rates at post treatment and at 12 m. The results suggest that MCT could be a brief and effective treatment and they provide a precedent for more definitive randomized controlled trials.     

Predicted errors in children's early sentence comprehension

Children use syntax to interpret sentences and learn verbs; this is syntactic bootstrapping. The structure-mapping account of early syntactic bootstrapping proposes that a partial representation of sentence structure, the set of nouns occurring with the verb, guides initial interpretation and provides an abstract format for new learning. This account predicts early successes, but also telltale errors: Toddlers should be unable to tell transitive sentences from other sentences containing two nouns. In testing this prediction, we capitalized on evidence that 21-month-olds use what they have learned about noun order in English sentences to understand new transitive verbs. In two experiments, 21-month-olds applied this noun-order knowledge to two-noun intransitive sentences, mistakenly assigning different interpretations to "The boy and the girl are gorping!" and "The girl and the boy are gorping!". This suggests that toddlers exploit partial representations of sentence structure to guide sentence interpretation; these sparse representations are useful, but error-prone.     

Retrieval-induced forgetting of arithmetic facts

Retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) is a widely studied phenomenon of human memory, but RIF of arithmetic facts remains relatively unexplored. In 2 experiments, we investigated RIF of simple addition facts (2 + 3 = 5) from practice of their multiplication counterparts (2 × 3 = 6). In both experiments, robust RIF expressed in response times occurred only for high-strength small-number addition facts with sums ≤ 10, indicating that RIF from multiplication practice was interference dependent. RIF of addition-fact memory was produced by multiplication retrieval (2 × 3 = ?) but not multiplication study (2 × 3 = 6), supporting an inhibitory mechanism of RIF in arithmetic memory. Finally, RIF occurred with multiplication practiced in word format (three × four) and addition tested later in digit format (3 + 4), which provides evidence that digit and written-word formats for arithmetic accessed a common semantic retrieval network. The results support the view that addition and multiplication facts are stored in an interrelated semantic network and that RIF of competing addition facts is an intrinsic process of multiplication fact retrieval.     

It's in the sample: the effects of sample size and sample diversity on the breadth of inductive generalization

Developmental studies have provided mixed evidence with regard to the question of whether children consider sample size and sample diversity in their inductive generalizations. Results from four experiments with 105 undergraduates, 105 school-age children (M = 7.2 years), and 105 preschoolers (M = 4.9 years) showed that preschoolers made a higher rate of projections from large samples than from small samples when samples were diverse (Experiments 1 and 3) but not when samples were homogeneous (Experiment 4) and not when the task required a choice between two samples (Experiment 2). Furthermore, when a property occurred in large and diverse samples, preschoolers exhibited a broad pattern of projection, generalizing the property to items from categories not represented in the evidence. In contrast, adults followed a normative pattern of induction and never attributed properties to items from categories not represented in the evidence. School-age children showed a mixed pattern of results.     

A Meta-analytic Review of the Role of Child Anxiety Sensitivity in Child Anxiety

Conflicting findings exist regarding (1) whether anxiety sensitivity (AS) is a construct distinct from anxiety in children and (2) the specific nature of the role of AS in child anxiety. This study uses meta-analytic techniques to (1) determine whether youth (ages 6–18 years) have been reported to experience AS, (2) examine whether AS differentiates anxiety disordered youth from youth without diagnoses, and (3) ascertain whether AS distinguishes youth with panic disorder from those with other anxiety disorders. The weighted mean effect size analyses included 15 studies and 6,579 participants. Results suggested positive correlational relationships between AS and anxiety for children (r = 0.26) and adolescents (r = 0.36) and higher levels of AS for anxiety disordered youth than non-clinical youth (d = 0.64). Findings tentatively suggested higher levels of AS for youth with panic disorder than youth diagnosed with other anxiety disorders. Implications and future directions in the research of child AS are discussed.     

Exposure to severe urban air pollution influences cognitive outcomes, brain volume and systemic inflammation in clinically healthy children

Exposure to severe air pollution produces neuroinflammation and structural brain alterations in children. We tested whether patterns of brain growth, cognitive deficits and white matter hyperintensities (WMH) are associated with exposures to severe air pollution. Baseline and 1 year follow-up measurements of global and regional brain MRI volumes, cognitive abilities (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised, WISC-R), and serum inflammatory mediators were collected in 20 Mexico City (MC) children (10 with white matter hyperintensities, WMH⁺, and 10 without, WMH⁻) and 10 matched controls (CTL) from a low polluted city. There were significant differences in white matter volumes between CTL and MC children - both WMH⁺ and WMH⁻ - in right parietal and bilateral temporal areas. Both WMH⁻ and WMH⁺ MC children showed progressive deficits, compared to CTL children, on the WISC-R Vocabulary and Digit Span subtests. The cognitive deficits in highly exposed children match the localization of the volumetric differences detected over the 1 year follow-up, since the deficits observed are consistent with impairment of parietal and temporal lobe functions. Regardless of the presence of prefrontal WMH, Mexico City children performed more poorly across a variety of cognitive tests, compared to CTL children, thus WMH⁺ is likely only partially identifying underlying white matter pathology. Together these findings reveal that exposure to air pollution may perturb the trajectory of cerebral development and result in cognitive deficits during childhood.