Divergent and Convergent Group Creativity in an Asynchronous Online Environment

This study examined the influence of various group diversity dimensions on collaborative creativity related to the healthcare system. Research findings on the association between diversity and brainstorming performance has been mixed. Diversity that increases cognitive stimulation or promotes elaboration has been shown to increase group performance. Participants exchanged ideas, replied, and elaborated using an electronic discussion board in an asynchronous fashion in groups of five over a period of 4 weeks. The groups varied in diversity of ethnicity, gender, age, and political orientation, but participants were not made aware of this diversity. Age and gender diversity were related to lower levels of replying to ideas and lower idea novelty but political diversity was related to increased replies and novelty. If a topic engages people with different perspectives to actively respond to others’ ideas, this can increase the creative potential of idea sharing in groups. Political or value-based diversity has the potential for creative solutions if the other participants’ political or value-based identities are not made salient.     

Bingeing,purging, and estimates of parental attitudes regarding female achievement

A questionnaire measuring respondents' beliefs about the attitudes regarding female achievement held by their parents was distributed to 326 women attending a state university. Women who report frequent bingeing are more likely than other women to report that (1) their parents believed a woman's place is in the home (2) their mothers were unhappy with their own careers, (3) their fathers thought the respondents' mothers were not intelligent, and (4) their fathers treated a male as the most intelligent sibling in the family. Reports of fathers' attitudes regarding mothers' intelligence and the proper role for women are related to respondents' self-reports of purging, but only among those women who are much more concerned with academic achievement than with household skills.     

Professional training of child psychologists

The present authors address the need for specialized professional training for psychologists who primarily work with the problems of childhood. It is argued that the area of child psychology is an amalgam of selected components of developmental, educational, and clinical psychology, and further that it is sufficiently discrete to warrant specialized training programs for child psychologists. Questions concerning the particular content of such training, and the level at which the training should take place, are raised. Various options regarding the answers to these questions are discussed, and a specific recommendation is presented.     

Cerebral Anesthetization for Localization of Speech: The Contribution of W. James Gardner

In 1949, the neurologist Juhn Wada reported the first use of a new procedure for determining the localization of speech and language in neurological patients: examination of the effects on speech and language after injecting a barbiturate, sodium amytal, into the internal carotid artery of each hemisphere in succession. By the 1960s, Wada'sIntracarotid Amobarbital Procedure,orIAP,had become the method of choice for identifying the speech-dominant side in one kind of neurological patient, persons with epilepsy who are candidates for surgical resection, and it remains so today. In 1941, however, an American neurosurgeon, W. James Gardner, reported his use of a different anesthetization procedure for speech localization in neurological patients. Instead of injecting sodium amytal through the blood supply, as in the IAP, Gardner injected procaine hydrochloride directly into cortical tissue. In this paper, we provide a brief biography of Gardner. We then discuss his method of cortical anesthetization, the theoretical and empirical background guiding his use of this method and his choice of patients, and, finally, the fate of Gardner's method within the scientific community.     

On the naming of color words and color patches

Subjects can name color words faster than they can name color patches. To account for that effect, a generic model of naming is described which assumes that words access the mental lexicon directly, whereas color patches do so only indirectly via an initial imaginal or semantic representation. However, Lund (1927) reported that the naming advantage for words disappeared when all the items to be named on a page were the same (i.e., they were blocked). In the present study, three experiments are reported that were designed to provide a clearer empirical definition of Lund’s blocking effect and to ascertain the extent to which it requires a modification of the generic model. The blocked lists had 50 items arranged into 10 blocks, with each block homogeneous with respect to color. The block lengths were either all a predictable length of 5 items or they varied randomly from 1 to 9 items. The data indicated the following: (1) The blocking effect occurred even when the task required a full identification of each item, and (2) the blocking effect was confined to within-block transitions. Blocking seemed to eliminate the word advantage by allowing the subject to re-use the lexical entry used for the immediately prior item, which is consistent with the generic model.     

Visual short-term memory, response delay, and age

Recall and recognition memory performance of 12 young (M = 19 yr.) and 12 older (M = 72 yr.) females was studied in relation to response delay (5, 25, and 125 sec.) and stimulus complexity (6.1 and 13.7 bits of information). The subjects were matched on verbal IQ, visual acuity, and educational levels. Stimuli were abstract, black and white, 4 X 4 square matrices. Age-related decrements in memory performance were associated with stimulus complexity but not with response delay. Older subjects also reported experiencing encoding difficulties during the registration phase. The results were discussed with reference to the locus of age-related decrements in visual short-term memory.     

Gender-role adoption and sex as academic and psychological risk factors

Five hundred and ten first-year junior high school students were administered a battery of psychological tests. On the basis of their scores from two gender-role adoption measures, three smaller groups were extracted within each biological sex: masculine, feminine, and undifferentiated individuals. Feminine students reported a greater amount of discomfort (vulnerability). A battery of tests administered toward the end of that school year revealed that females attained greater neuroticism and alienation scores than did their male peers. Possible explanations for this pubescent self-report of maladjustment are the more masculine orientation of the junior high school in comparison to the elementary school and the menarche.The authors wish to thank Ms. S. Chesterman, Regional Director of the Montreal Catholic School Commission, and Mr. K. Quinn, Principal of Sir Wilfred Laurier Junior High School, for granting us permission to disrupt school activities in order to test their students. We also wish to acknowledge the assistance of the following members of Sir Wilfred Laurier: Mr. O. Hruby, Vice-Principal; Sr. G. Larocque, Vice-Principal; Mr. S. Radeschi, key teacher; and members of the administrative and teaching staff.