Crossing the invisible line: De-differentiation of wake,sleep and dreaming may engender both creative insight and psychopathology

Writing about dreaming, the poet Raymond Carver said “I feel as if I’ve crossed some kind of invisible line”. In creative people, the “line” between wake, dreaming and psychopathology may be porous, engendering a de-differentiated, super-critical, hybrid state. Evidence exists for a relationship between creativity and psychopathology but its nature has been elusive. De-differentiation between wake, sleep and dreaming may be the common substrate, as dream-like cognition pervades wake and wake-like neurophysiology suffuses sleep. Chaos theory posits brain states as inherently labile, transient and dynamically unstable. Over and above transient dissociations, an enduring and, sometimes, progressive, de-differentiation may be possible. Evidence indicates that sleep and dreaming facilitate creative insight. In consequence, a mild to moderate form of de-differentiation may enhance creativity but if wake-like neurobiology permeates sleep this may disrupt sleep-dependent memory processing and emotional regulation. If de-differentiation is progressive and enduring, various forms of psychopathology may result.     

The role of personal goals in autonoetic experience when imagining future events

Although autonoetic experience—a sense of mental time travel—has been considered as the hallmark of episodic future thinking, what determines this subjective feeling is not yet fully understood. Here, we investigated the role of autobiographical knowledge by manipulating the relevance of imagined events for personal goals. Participants were asked to imagine three types of events (goal-related future events, experimenter-provided future events, and atemporal events) and to assess various characteristics of their mental representations. The results showed that the three types of events were represented with similar levels of detail and vividness. Importantly, however, goal-related future events were associated with a stronger autonoetic experience. Furthermore, autonoetic experience was significantly predicted by the importance of imagined events for personal goals. These findings suggest that the subjective feeling of pre-experiencing one’s personal future in part depends on the extent to which imagined events can be placed in an autobiographical context.     

Developing a reflective practice model for engineering leadership

This paper advances discourse pertaining to the development of a reflective practice model in engineering leadership. It is based on reflective experiences over a four-year period that were developed as part of a Doctoral in Business Administration module. It is contextualised within an engineering consultancy and the narrative is described from an Engineering Leadership perspective; the narrative is also woven with theory and there is the inclusion of a DBA Practitioner lens on the findings. The paper identifies the model developed for reflective practice and presents evidence of personal learning and thinking styles as its outcome. The paper concludes that reflective practice is a personal journey of learning and that model development is a choice of what suits the individual.     

“The ripples are big”: Storying the impact of doping in sport beyond the sanctioned athlete

ObjectiveThe purpose of this paper was to extend current doping research efforts by shifting the focus away from a doping-user perspective to examine the experiences of elite athletes that have been personally affected by other athletes' doping behaviours.DesignThis research works within the interpretive paradigm, adopting relativist ontology and transactional/subjectivist epistemology.MethodConversational interviews were conducted with ‘competitive’ (N = 2) and ‘retired’ (N = 2) elite Track and Field athletes from multiple countries. In order to communicate the findings in a way that captures the complexity of the issue, whilst also appealing to the athletes this issue affects, creative non-fiction stories were used to present the findings.ResultsTwo stories were created; one incorporating the ‘competitive’ athletes' experiences and one presenting the ‘retired’ athletes' accounts. The stories detail financial, emotional, and relational implications stemming from others' use of performance enhancing drugs. Critically, the impact is not ephemeral; the retired athletes detailed the long-term implications of their experiences. Meanwhile, the competitive athletes suggest that given the current state of sport, they regularly have to defend their status as ‘clean athletes’. Thus, the ripples of doping in sport appear to be far reaching and enduring.ConclusionsIncorporating a novel mode of knowledge production within the doping literature, the stories presented here demonstrate elite athletes' candid accounts of being impacted by others’ doping behaviours in sport. This study also emphasises the value of adopting novel and creative approaches to data collection and representation within the field of doping research.     

Prevalence and determinants of direct and generative modes of production of episodic future thoughts in the word cueing paradigm

Recent research suggests that episodic future thoughts can be formed through the same dual mechanisms, direct and generative, as autobiographical memories. However, the prevalence and determinants of the direct production of future event representations remain unclear. Here, we addressed this issue by collecting self-reports of production modes, response times (RTs), and verbal protocols for the production past and future events in the word cueing paradigm. Across three experiments, we found that both past and future events were frequently reported to come directly to mind in response to the cue, and RTs confirmed that events were produced faster for direct than for generative responses. When looking at the determinants of direct responses, we found that most past and future events that were directly produced had already been thought of on a previous occasion, and the frequency of previous thoughts predicted the occurrence of direct access. The direct production of autobiographical thoughts was also more frequent for past and future events that were judged important and emotionally intense. Collectively, these findings provide novel evidence that the direct production of episodic future thoughts is frequent in the word cueing paradigm and often involves the activation of personally significant “memories of the future.”     

You'll change more than I will: Adults’ predictions about their own and others’ future preferences

It has been argued that adults underestimate the extent to which their preferences will change over time. We sought to determine whether such mispredictions are the result of a difficulty imagining that one's own current and future preferences may differ or whether it also characterizes our predictions about the future preferences of others. We used a perspective-taking task in which we asked young people how much they liked stereotypically young-person items (e.g., Top 40 music, adventure vacations) and stereotypically old-person items (e.g., jazz, playing bridge) now, and how much they would like them in the distant future (i.e., when they are 70 years old). Participants also made these same predictions for a generic same-age, same-sex peer. In a third condition, participants predicted how much a generic older (i.e., age 70) same-sex adult would like items from both categories today. Participants predicted less change between their own current and future preferences than between the current and future preferences of a peer. However, participants estimated that, compared to a current older adult today, their peer would like stereotypically young items more in the future and stereotypically old items less. The fact that peers’ distant-future estimated preferences were different from the ones they made for “current” older adults suggests that even though underestimation of change of preferences over time is attenuated when thinking about others, a bias still exists.     

才思泉涌“举步”间：体育运动对创造性思维的影响

创造性思维是运用独特且新颖的观点解决问题的思维形式,发散与聚合思维是两种常见的类型。体育运动对发散与聚合思维具有不同的影响,且受到运动强度、方式、时长以及个体差异等因素的调节。目前解释体育运动如何影响创造性思维的理论有情绪假说、执行功能假说与身心隐喻理论。未来的研究需要在进一步重视研究规范性的基础上,加强神经科学研究并拓宽群体覆盖面,关注体育运动与创造性成就的关系,为开具创造性思维运动处方提供有力的科学支持。     

Measuring Creativity with Planned Missing Data

This paper introduces a method for the assessment of creativity that relies on creativity tasks, a subjective evaluation procedure, and a planned missing data design that offers a drastic reduction in the overall implementation costs (administration time and scoring procedure). This method was tested on a sample of 149 people, using three creativity tasks as a basis. Participants were instructed to produce several ideas in each task and then to select what they considered to be their best two ideas (i.e., “Top 2” procedure; Silvia, Winterstein, Willse, Barona, et al., Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 2 , 2008 and 68). These ideas were then evaluated by a panel of peers and experts. Creativity ratings were analyzed with structural equations; measurement models were estimated for each task and correlations between factor-scores across the three tasks were investigated. Further insights regarding validity are provided through systematic investigation of the relationship between fluency scores, creativity ratings, intelligence tasks, self-reported idea generation abilities, and creative activities and achievements. Overall, the results support the viability of this new approach, providing evidence of convergent and discriminant validity. They are discussed in relation to past research and avenues for further extension are proposed.     

Thinking about decisions: An integrative approach of person and task factors

Decisions vary. They may vary in both content and complexity. People also vary. An important way that people vary is how much they think. Some prior research investigating thinking and decision making largely conflicts with most traditional decision theories. For example, if considering an array of products to choose from, thinking more about the alternative's attributes should lead to a better decision. However, some research indicates that thinking more may also lead to focusing on irrelevant aspects of the decision and a less optimal outcome. We propose that this conflict in the literature exists because of a failure to consider the interaction between the individual and the decision task. To test this, we used separate methodologies that enhance or attenuate a person's thinking. In Study 1, we selected people who were especially high or low in need for cognition and had them complete a robust decision-making inventory, which included both complex and simple tasks. In Study 2, we manipulated participant's level of glucose, which acts as the brain's fuel to enhance or attenuate thinking ability. Both studies provide insight for understanding our central tenant that more thought leads to better decisions in complex tasks but does not influence simple decisions. These findings show how the individual's thinking can interact with the constructive elements of the task to shape decision choice.