Personality determinants of the commitment to the profession of art

The model of commitment presented in the present report postulates personality to be the crucial element in the development and maintenance of commitment to the profession of art. The objectives of the research reported here were to (a) demonstrate the typicality of the artist personality and (b) identify the traits which characterize committed and uncommitted artists. Three groups of artists were compared: mature established artists described as committed over a lifetime, committed art students, and uncommitted art students. The instrument used to evaluate personality was the Adjective Check List (ACL; Gough 8c Heilbrun, 1983). Both committed and uncommitted artists presented a typical personality structure; but in contrast to the committed, the uncommitted were characterized by low self‐esteem, a negative self‐image, impaired motivation, low staying power, and an inability to find a clear direction. Both art students and mature artists agreed about the order of importance of 11 factors considered to be determinants of committment. They both placed particular emphasis on autonomy, possibility to experiment, ease of inspiration, and early identification with the profession.     

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.     

Brief Sensation Seeking Scale for Chinese – Cultural adaptation and psychometric assessment

International behavioral research requires instruments that are not culturally-biased to assess sensation seeking. In this study we described a culturally adapted version of the Brief Sensation Seeking Scale for Chinese (BSSS-C) and its psychometric characteristics. The adapted scale was assessed using an adult sample (n = 238) with diverse educational and residential backgrounds. The BSSS-C (Cronbach alpha = 0.90) was correlated with the original Brief Sensation Seeking Scale (r = 0.85, p < 0.01) and fitted the four-factor model well (CFI = 0.98, SRMR = 0.03). The scale scores significantly predicted intention to and actual engagement in a number of health risk behaviors, including alcohol consumption, cigarette smoking, and sexual risk behaviors. In conclusion, the BSSS-C has adequate reliability and validity, supporting its utility in China and potential in other developing countries.     

Age and emotion affect how we look at a face: Visual scan patterns differ for own-age versus other-age emotional faces

We investigated how age of faces and emotion expressed in faces affect young (n=30) and older (n=20) adults’ visual inspection while viewing faces and judging their expressions. Overall, expression identification was better for young than older faces, suggesting that interpreting expressions in young faces is easier than in older faces, even for older participants. Moreover, there were age-group differences in misattributions of expressions, in that young participants were more likely to label disgusted faces as angry, whereas older adults were more likely to label angry faces as disgusted. In addition to effects of emotion expressed in faces, age of faces affected visual inspection of faces: Both young and older participants spent more time looking at own-age than other-age faces, with longer looking at own-age faces predicting better own-age expression identification. Thus, cues used in expression identification may shift as a function of emotion and age of faces, in interaction with age of participants.     

Sartre on the Ontological Need for God

Adherents to the relatively new discipline of neurotheology profess that religious faith has a brain neural substrate, with structural, functional, and genetic elements that “hardwire” us to believe in God. It is argued here that a better way to approach the question of why people believe in a transcendent being would be to interrogate the structure of human being, with the intention of uncovering the meanings that underlie the phenomenon of faith. Jean-Paul Sartre may have already provided a necessary and sufficient explanation for this phenomenon. We are, he concluded, ontologically inclined to identify with a supreme being whose essence and existence transcend the limits of our own finite being. It is one thing to arrive at such a conclusion intuitively, but altogether something else to demonstrate, as Sartre does, how this conclusion follows from the structure of human being itself.     

Enhancing Criterion-Related Validity Through Bottom-Up Contextualization of Personality Inventories: The Construction of an Ecological Conscientiousness Scale for Ph.D. Candidates

In this article the concept of “ecological personality scales” is introduced. These are contextualized inventories with a high ecological validity. They are developed in a bottom-up or qualitative way and combine a relatively high trait specificity with a relatively high situational specificity. An ecological Conscientiousness or time management scale for Ph.D. candidates was developed. It significantly predicted Ph.D. performance criteria and showed incremental validity beyond Big Five (Study 1) and narrow trait and frame-of-reference scales (Study 2). These findings suggest that an ecological approach may contribute to further improving the criterion validity of personality measures.     

Duchenne display responses towards sixteen enjoyable emotions: Individual differences between no and fear of being laughed at

The present study aims to identify whether individuals’ with a fear of being laughed at (gelotophobia), respond with less facially displayed joy (Duchenne display) generally towards enjoyable emotions or only those eliciting laughter. Forty participants (no vs. gelotophobia) described their feelings to scenarios prototypical for the 16 enjoyable emotions proposed by Ekman (Emotions revealed: recognizing faces and feelings to improve communication and emotional life. Times Books, New York, 2003), while being unobtrusively filmed. Facial responses were coded using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS, Ekman et al. in Facial Action Coding System: a technique for the measurement of facial movement. Consulting Psychologists Press, Palo Alto, 2002). The gelotophobes showed less facial expression of joy compared to the non-gelotophobes (Hypothesis 1) and this effect was stronger for frequency and intensity of Duchenne displays towards laughter-eliciting enjoyable emotions than for no laughter-eliciting enjoyable emotions (Hypothesis 2). Moreover, the no gelotophobia group responded more strongly to laughter-eliciting than to no laughter-eliciting enjoyable emotions. Individuals with marked gelotophobia showed the reverse pattern, displaying less joy in laughter-eliciting emotions which may impact on their social interaction, as communication may break down when positive emotion are not reciprocated.     

汉语学龄前儿童正字法意识的发展

本研究选择北京地区幼儿园3岁、4岁、5岁儿童各31、48、33名, 采用单部件意识测验和部件位置及功能意识测验系统探查了学龄前儿童的正字法意识各个层面的发展状况。单部件意识测验包括部件替换、部件缺失和部件旋转三个部分; 部件位置及功能意识测验分为假字和非字两个部分, 而非字又包括两形非字和形声非字。结果发现单部件意识测验中, 5岁组儿童在部件替换水平上的得分显著高于3岁组儿童, 而3岁组与4岁组、4岁组与5岁组儿童之间无显著差异; 部件缺失和部件旋转水平上, 三个年龄段的儿童的得分表现出明显的增长趋势。部件位置及功能意识测验中, 假字得分在三个年龄段之间无显著差异; 非字得分随年龄增长显著提高。这些结果表明, 单部件意识在学前期处于不断发展的阶段, 其中对部件替换的非字的拒绝能力发展较早, 部件缺失和部件旋转非字的拒绝能力发展较晚; 部件位置及功能意识在学前期已经开始发展, 3岁儿童已经具有假字符合正字法规则的认识, 但对非字违反部件位置合法性和功能完整性的认识直到4岁左右才开始萌芽, 5岁还未成熟。     

Psychology,health and health care

This article traces the development of the World Health Organization's emphasis on psychological and behavioural factors in health and notes its encouragement of recognition of these factors by member states. The article further outlines the reasons for this increasing recognition and stresses the important role of psychological and behavioural factors in the maintenance of health and prevention of illness.     

A phase-field model for deformation twinning

We propose a phase-field model for modeling microstructure evolution during deformation twinning. The order parameters are proportional to the shear strains defined in terms of twin plane orientations and twinning directions. Using a face-centered cubic Al as an example, the deformation energy as a function of shear strain is obtained using first-principle calculations. The gradient energy coefficients are fitted to the twin boundary energies along the twinning planes and to the dislocation core energies along the directions that are perpendicular to the twinning planes. The elastic strain energy of a twinned structure is included using the Khachaturyan's elastic theory. We simulated the twinning process and microstructure evolution under a number of fixed deformations and predicted the twinning plane orientations and microstructures.