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.     

Sex differences in spontaneous alternation and open-field behavior of hamsters: Habituation differences

With a minimal intratrial interval, male golden hamsters spontaneously alternated significantly less often in a T-maze than females. Since there was no sex difference in choice latencies, the alternation difference could not be accounted for by longer intertrial intervals experienced by males. Instead, the difference was ascribed to faster rates of habituation to novelty in females because they showed greater between-sessions declines in open-field ambulation than males. From an analysis of rearing scores it was concluded that attempts to escape from the apparatus may have been the principal motivating influence in both the T-maze and open field.     

TEACHING SUPPORTED EMPLOYEES WITH SEVERE MENTAL RETARDATION TO SOLVE PROBLEMS

Two individuals with severe mental retardation, employed by a janitorial supply company, were taught to use self-instruction in combination with multiple exemplar training to solve work-related problems. Use of the combined strategy resulted in generalization of the effects of independent variables, as well as generalization to nontrained problems. Use of the strategy is discussed in terms of promoting independent performance among supported employees.     

The use of structured multi-domain job analysis for the construction of assessment center methods and procedures

This article addresses the defensibility of the assessment center based on a content oriented validation strategy. One reason for the confusion in this area is the fact that there are no agreed upon methods for constructing the assessment procedures. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to describe how structured multi-domain job analysis information can be used to develop an assessment center which is well grounded with regard to content validity.     

Effects of flash luminance and positional expectancies on visual response latency

It is well established that human observers respond more quickly to visual targets that appear in expected locations than they do to ones in unexpected locations. These variations in simple reaction time have been attributed to a covert alignment of an attentional mechanism to the expected target location. The present experiments investigated the influence of strength of signal and strength of subject’s positional expectancy on the magnitude of this attentional effect. In the first experiment, target luminance was varied over a range of three log units, and it was found that the effects of luminance were essentially additive with the effect of the positional expectancy (i.e., the attention effect). The second experiment found that the magnitude of visual attention interacts with the information value of the precue used to create the spatial expectancy, although, once again, luminance had additive effects. The resuls are interpreted as indicating that, rather than influencing early visual processing, the act of attending to a spatial location operates fairly late in the detection process.