Creative Thinking Strategies for Life: A Course for Professional Adults Using Art

To thrive in today's economy and the workforce of the future, individuals need creativity and problem-solving skills. Emotion skills have been increasingly discussed as well, with companies listing emotional intelligence as one of the top skills needed for professional success. The present paper describes a course designed to teach professional adults two sets of creativity skills (problem finding and idea generation) and two sets of emotional intelligence skills (using emotions to facilitate thinking and understanding emotions) using visual art as a medium. The course consisted of eight, 60-min sessions in which professional adults participated in art observation and art engagement activities. Fifty-six professional adults completed measures of creative abilities and emotional intelligence skills in a pretest, posttest, and 2-month follow-up design. Participants who engaged in the course showed significant gains in the originality of their ideas on divergent thinking and problem construction tasks, as well as their self-reported creative behavior compared with controls. No significant changes in emotion understanding were detected. We discuss the course's distinct value to creativity and emotion skills training research.     

The Relationship between Emotional Intelligence and Domain-Specific and Domain-General Creativity

The Amusement Park Theory of Creativity, which represents both domain-specific and domain-general perspectives of creativity, calls for more research on how individual difference constructs are related to creativity at all ends of the domain-specificity and general spectrum. Toward this goal, this study examined emotional intelligence (using the Emotional Intelligence Scale) in relationship with both a domain-general measure (the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults) and a domain-specific measure (Kaufman Domains of Creativity Scale) in a sample of 281 Chinese undergraduates. Although emotional intelligence demonstrated no relationship with divergent thinking, it did positively predict all five domains of creativity on the self-report measure (ranging from .52 to .77). These findings add to the nuanced relationship between emotional intelligence and creativity and serve as a call for more work of this nature.     

NIETZSCHE AND UNAMUNO ON CONATUS AND THE AGAPEIC WAY OF LIFE

Unamuno saw in his defense of religious faith a response to Nietzsche’s criticisms of the Christian, agapeic way of life. To Nietzsche’s claim that engaging in this way of life is something antinatural and life-denying, insofar as it goes against the (alleged) natural tendency to increase one’s own power, Unamuno responded that an agapeic way of life is precisely a direct expression of this natural tendency. Far from being something that goes against our natural inclinations, Unamuno says, an agapeic way of life is a life-affirming exercise, something we are led to given our own natural condition. Hence, the aim of this essay is to comment on Unamuno’s criticism of Nietzsche and to point out the philosophical relevance of Unamuno’s attempt to provide a natural foundation for religious faith when assessing Nietzsche’s criticisms of the possibility of carrying out a Christian, agapeic way of life.     

ON THE BENEFITS OF PHILOSOPHY AS A WAY OF LIFE IN A GENERAL INTRODUCTORY COURSE

Philosophy as a way of life (PWOL) places investigations of value, meaning, and the good life at the center of philosophical investigation, especially of one’s own life. This essay argues that PWOL is compatible with general introductory philosophy courses, further arguing that PWOL-based general introductions have several philosophical and pedagogical benefits. These include the ease with which high-impact practices, situated skill development, and students’ ability to “think like a disciplinarian” may be incorporated into such courses, relative to more traditional introductory courses, as well as the demonstration of philosophy’s value to students by explicitly tying philosophical investigation to students’ own lives.     

The knowledge norm of assertion in dialectical context

This paper aims to show that the Knowledge Norm of Assertion (KNA) can lead to trouble in certain dialectical contexts. Suppose a person knows that p but does not know that they know that p. They assert p in compliance with the KNA. Their interlocutor responds: ‘but do you know that p?’ It will be shown that the KNA blocks the original asserter from providing any good response to this perfectly natural follow-up question, effectively forcing them to retract p from the conversational scoreboard. This finding is not simply of theoretical interest: I will argue that the KNA would allow the retort ‘but do you know that p?’ to be weaponized in strategic communication, serving as a tool for silencing speakers without having to challenge their testimonial contributions on their own merits. Our analysis can thereby provide a new dimension to the study of epistemic injustice, as well as underscoring the importance of considering the norms governing speech acts also from the point of view of non-ideal social contexts.     

Denial of gender discrimination is associated with better subjective well-being among women: A system justification account

Despite the fact that women face socially and politically sanctioned disadvantages every day, a large percentage of women and men report that gender discrimination is no longer a problem. Across three studies, which together include over 20,000 participants from 23 countries, we test the hypothesis that denial (vs. acknowledgement) of gender discrimination is associated with higher subjective well-being among women (Studies 1–3), and this is because denying gender discrimination promotes the view that the system is fair (Study 1). We further show that this happens above and beyond personal experiences with sexism (Study 1) and that the association is stronger in countries where sexism is relatively high (vs. low; Study 3). We argue that denial of discrimination is an individual-level coping mechanism and that, like other self-group distancing strategies, it may perpetuate gender inequality.     

How Far Have we Come? An Integrative Review of the Current Literature on Sense of Community and Well-being

Sense of community and well-being are considered core tenets in the field of community psychology, acting as focal points for theory, research, and action. This integrative review synthesizes the empirical literature on sense of community and well-being with respect to four research questions focused on the relationships between these variables, the methodologies used to study those relationships, and how future research might expand upon the current literature. A search of the available literature produced 30 articles that met the search criteria, based primarily on conceptualizations and measurement of both sense of community and hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. This review suggests a general consensus across the literature of a positive relationship between sense of community and well-being among both youth and adults in a variety of settings, and discusses the strengths and limitations of this area of research, pointing to the need for more nuanced, ecologically valid research that incorporates more qualitative and critical methodologies. We hope that this review can promote a more thorough understanding of how sense of community and individual well-being relate to each other, and that ongoing research in this area can be a catalyst for action research and interventions that are applied to pressing contemporary issues as well as strengths-based approaches focused on how to foster and support the well-being of individuals within their community contexts.     

Do behavioral measures of self-control assess construct-level variance?

A wide range of measures have been used to assess self-control including executive function tasks, delay of gratification tasks, and persistence and willpower tasks. The current study sought to examine the convergent and predictive validity of these measures, provide theoretical backing for why we might or might not expect high correlations between different indicators of the construct, and question whether such measures are assessing construct-level variance. The results largely replicated prior research, with the majority of correlations being small in magnitude and non-significant. Possible interpretations include indicators assessing distinct and unrelated subdomains of self-control, the inappropriate use of measures that maximize within person variance, indicators being plagued by large sources of error variance, or some combination of these.     

The use of strategies and messages to alter aggressive interactions

Male and female college students were instigated to aggression by a confederate's shocks during a preliminary task. The confederate informed half of the treatment subjects of the response strategy which he intended to adopt. The other half received an irrelevant message. All subjects then competed against the confederate, who employed one of the following five response consequence strategies: a) set a maximum shock on all trials; b) set a minimum shock on all trials; c) set shocks identical to the subject's response on the preceding trial; d) set shocks two settings below the subject's response; or e) set shocks two settings above the subject's. The subject's latency to setting a shock, the intensities of the shocks set, the durations of the shock settings, and the subject's reaction times were recorded. When an irrelevant message was delivered, passive responses, well below those of the opponent, resulted in the lowest level of retaliation. In the presence of a relevant message, the match-same strategy emerged as an effective deterrent to aggressive behavior. The results were found to be consistent with predictions derived from an application of the norm of reciprocity and research demonstrating the enhancing effects achieved through the communication of existing contingencies.     

The neural pathways mediating quiet-biting attack behavior from the hypothalamus in the cat: A functional autoradiographic study

Electrical stimulation of the region of the lateral hypothalamus produced a consistent form of quiet-biting attack behavior in cats. In one series of experiments, cats, implanted with electrodes from which attack had been elicited, were anesthetized and then were injected with a bolus of ¹⁴C-2-deoxyglucose at the same time as electrical stimulation was delivered through the attack electrodes. Brains prepared for X-ray autoradiography revealed that lateral hypothalamic stimulation activated the classical medial forebrain bundle pathway supplying the septal region, diagonal band, lateral preoptic area, and ventral tegmental region. Stimulation of quiet-attack sites in perifornical hypothalamus resulted in the activation of a much more extensive projection system which included the central and lateral tegmental fields of the midbrain and pons, and central gray region, as well as the structures described above. In a second series of experiments, ³H-leucine was placed into the region of the electrode tip from which attack was elicited in order to identify more precisely the pathways arising from that site. In general, tritiated amino acid radioautography replicated the ¹⁴C-2-deoxyglucose findings. In addition, the amino acid radioautographic data revealed the presence of extensive projections from perifornical hypothalamus to such pontine structures as the nucleus locus coeruleus, motor nucleus of NV , and the lateral pontine tegmental field. The functional connections between the lateral hypothalamic “attack region” and lateral preoptic zone were also confirmed by electrophysiological methods.