Dual pathways of emotional competence towards incremental and radical creativity: resource caravans through feedback-seeking frequency and breadth

ABSTRACT

This study examined how employees’ emotional competence predicts feedback-seeking behaviour (FSB) and consequently incremental and radical creativity on the basis of conservation of resource (COR) theory. We posit that emotional competence enhances the two types of creativity by generating resource caravans through distinct patterns of FSB. Our analysis based on the data collected from 206 employees from 85 work teams revealed that emotional competence has a significant indirect effect on the incremental creativity of team members, as rated by leaders, through frequent feedback seeking. Emotional competence also exhibited a considerable direct effect on radical creativity. In addition, emotional competence predicted source variety, namely, feedback-seeking breadth, which in turn contributed to radical creativity. This study offers new and useful theoretical and practical insights regarding the different types of creativity in the workplace by employing COR theory and the resource caravan perspective.     

Facial expressions and subjective assessments of emotions

There was conducted an experimental comparison of the objective (FaceReader 4.0) and subjective assessment of the severity of emotions on different scales. As objects, 18 short (no more than 2 s) videos were used, on which the same person (actress) expressed the given emotions by pronouncing the word “Yes”. These stimuli were selected based on previously conducted subjective scaling experiments. We used (1) a direct subjective quantitative assessment of each video clip separately for each of the parameters selected in the FaceReader 4.0 program (neutral, happy, angry, disgust, fear, sad, surprise) – the severity of the corresponding emotion was evaluated in points; (2) a direct subjective assessment of each video clip for each of the parameters allocated in the 4-dimensional spherical model of emotions (bad – good; confidence – surprise; attraction; defensive reaction: fear – aggression); (3) the methodology of the Semantic Differential Scaling (SD) by C. Osgood; (4) the PXLab Self-Assessment-Manikin Scales. As a result, the relationship of all the scales used was investigated and it was shown that the objective qualification of emotions (using the FaceReader 4.0 program) does not coincide with the results of subjective assessment of the same samples.     

Justice for the People? How Justice Sensitivity Can Foster and Impair Support for Populist Radical-Right Parties and Politicians in the United States and in Germany

Many people argue that support for populist radical-right political agents is motivated by people feeling “left behind” in globalized Western democracies. Empirical research supports this notion by showing that people who feel personally or collectively deprived are more likely to hold populist beliefs and anti-immigration attitudes. Our aim was to further investigate the psychological link between individuals' justice concerns and their preferences for populist radical-right political agents. We focused on stable individual differences in self-oriented and other-oriented justice concerns and argue that these should have opposing correlations with preferences for populist radical-right parties. We tested our hypotheses in two national samples, one from the United States (N = 1500) and one from Germany (N = 848). Sensitivity to injustice towards oneself enhanced the likelihood of preferring Trump (United States) and Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) (Germany) via increased anti-immigration attitudes and increased populist attitudes. Sensitivity to injustice towards others reduced the likelihood of preferring Trump and AfD via decreased anti-immigration attitudes. We discuss our findings in regard to how stable individual differences in the evaluation of fairness can motivate intra- and interpersonal political conflicts in modern w estern societies and how politics and mass media can fuel these conflicts.     

新颖性寻求对创造性行为表现的影响：语义网络的中介作用

研究采用物品多用途任务、中文复合远距离联想任务和汉语双字词词对相关性判断任务,考察新颖性寻求特质水平对创造性表现的影响,探明语义网络在其中的作用。结果发现：高新颖性寻求个体在物品多用途任务中有更高的新颖性得分,而在中文复合远距离联想任务中与低新颖性寻求个体表现一致;在低相关词对判断时,高新颖性寻求个体反应时更短;低相关词对的判断反应时在新颖性寻求对创造性行为表现的影响中起部分中介作用。结果预示,新颖性寻求特质有利于个体建构形成能快速激活远距离信息的语义网络,进而促进创造性行为表现。     

Is there something quantum-like about the human mental lexicon?

Following an early claim by Nelson and McEvoy suggesting that word associations can display ‘spooky action at a distance behaviour’, a serious investigation of the potentially quantum nature of such associations is currently underway. In this paper quantum theory is proposed as a framework suitable for modelling the human mental lexicon, specifically the results obtained from both intralist and extralist word association experiments. Some initial models exploring this hypothesis are discussed, and experiments capable of testing these models proposed.     

The enduring scandal of deduction

Deductive inference is usually regarded as being “tautological” or “analytical”: the information conveyed by the conclusion is contained in the information conveyed by the premises. This idea, however, clashes with the undecidability of first-order logic and with the (likely) intractability of Boolean logic. In this article, we address the problem both from the semantic and the proof-theoretical point of view. We propose a hierarchy of propositional logics that are all tractable (i.e. decidable in polynomial time), although by means of growing computational resources, and converge towards classical propositional logic. The underlying claim is that this hierarchy can be used to represent increasing levels of “depth” or “informativeness” of Boolean reasoning. Special attention is paid to the most basic logic in this hierarchy, the pure “intelim logic”, which satisfies all the requirements of a natural deduction system (allowing both introduction and elimination rules for each logical operator) while admitting of a feasible (quadratic) decision procedure. We argue that this logic is “analytic” in a particularly strict sense, in that it rules out any use of “virtual information”, which is chiefly responsible for the combinatorial explosion of standard classical systems. As a result, analyticity and tractability are reconciled and growing degrees of computational complexity are associated with the depth at which the use of virtual information is allowed.     

How children block learning from ignorant speakers

Preschool children typically do not learn words from ignorant or unreliable speakers. Here, we examined the mechanism by which these learning failures occur by modifying the comprehension test procedure that measures word learning. Following lexical training by a knowledgeable or ignorant speaker, 48 preschool-aged children were asked either a standard comprehension test question (i.e., “Which one is the blicket”) or a question about the labeling episode (i.e., “Which one did I say is the blicket”). Immediately after training, children chose the object labeled by an ignorant speaker when asked the episode question, but not when asked the semantic question. However, the advantage for episode questions disappeared when the same children were asked after a brief delay. These findings show that children encode their experiences with ignorant speakers, but do not form semantic representations on the basis of those experiences.     

Qualitative differences in the representation of abstract versus concrete words: Evidence from the visual-world paradigm

In the present visual-world experiment, participants were presented with visual displays that included a target item that was a semantic associate of an abstract or a concrete word. This manipulation allowed us to test a basic prediction derived from the qualitatively different representational framework that supports the view of different organizational principles for concrete and abstract words in semantic memory. Our results confirm the assumption of a primary organizational principle based on association for abstract words, different from the semantic similarity principle proposed for concrete words, and provide the first piece of evidence in support of this view obtained from healthy participants. The results shed light on the representational structure of abstract and concrete concepts.     

Brain oscillations during semantic evaluation of speech

Changes in oscillatory brain activity have been related to perceptual and cognitive processes such as selective attention and memory matching. Here we examined brain oscillations, measured with electroencephalography (EEG), during a semantic speech processing task that required both lexically mediated memory matching and selective attention. Participants listened to nouns spoken in male and female voices, and detected an animate target (p = 20%) in a train of inanimate standards or vice versa. For a control task, subjects listened to the same words and detected a target male voice in standards of a female voice or vice versa. The standard trials of the semantic task showed enhanced upper beta (25–30 Hz) and gamma band (GBA, 30–60 Hz) activity compared to the voice task. Upper beta and GBA enhancement was accompanied by a suppression of alpha (8–12 Hz) and lower to mid beta (13–20 Hz) activity mainly localized to posterior electrodes. Enhancement of phase-locked theta activity peaking near 275 ms also occurred over the midline electrodes. Theta, upper beta, and gamma band enhancement may reflect lexically mediated template matching in auditory memory, whereas the alpha and beta suppression likely indicate increased attentional processes and memory demands.