Helping Parents Cope with Suicide Threats: An Approach Based on Nonviolent Resistance

Parent training in nonviolent resistance was adapted to deal with situations of suicide threat by children, adolescents, and young adults. The approach aims at reducing the risk potential and the mutual distress surrounding the threat‐interaction. Parent training in nonviolent resistance has been shown to help parents move from helplessness to presence, from isolation to connectedness, from submission to resistance, from escalation to self‐control, and from mutual distancing and hostility to care and support. Those emphases can be crucial for the diminution of suicide risk. Parents show good ability to implement the approach and report gains on various areas over and beyond the reduction in suicide threat. A particular advantage is that the method can be used also in cases where the young person threatening suicide is not willing to cooperate.     

The dual pathway to creativity model: Creative ideation as a function of flexibility and persistence

The dual pathway to creativity model argues that creativity—the generation of original and appropriate ideas—is a function of cognitive flexibility and cognitive persistence, and that dispositional or situational variables may influence creativity either through their effects on flexibility, on persistence, or both. This model is tested in a number of studies in which participants performed creative ideation tasks. We review work showing that cognitive flexibility, operationalised as the number of content categories surveyed, directly relates to idea originality, but that originality can also be achieved by exploring a few content categories in great depth (i.e., persistence). We also show that a global processing mode is associated with cognitive flexibility, but only leads to high originality in tasks that capitalise on cognitive flexibility. We finally show that activating positive mood states enhance creativity because they stimulate flexibility, while activating negative mood states can enhance creativity because they stimulate persistence. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

What Are They Thinking? A National Study of Stability and Change in Divorce Ideation

This study reports on a nationally representative sample of married individuals ages 25–50 (N = 3,000) surveyed twice (1 year apart) to investigate the phenomenon of divorce ideation, or what people are thinking when they are thinking about divorce. Twenty‐eight percent of respondents had thought their marriage was in serious trouble in the past but not recently. Another 25% had thoughts about divorce in the last 6 months. Latent Class Analysis revealed three distinct groups among those thinking about divorce at Time 1: soft thinkers (49%), long‐term‐serious thinkers (45%), and conflicted thinkers (6%). Yet, divorce ideation was not static; 31% of Time 1 thinkers were not thinking about it 1 year later (and 36% of nonthinkers at Time 1 were thinking about it 1 year later). Also, Latent Transition Analysis revealed 49% of Time 1 long‐term‐serious thinkers, 56% of soft thinkers, and 51% of conflicted thinkers had shifted groups at Time 2, mostly in the direction of less and softer thinking about divorce. Overall, divorce ideation is common but dynamic, and it is not necessarily an indication of imminent marital dissolution.     

The structure of disgust: domain specificity in relation to contamination ideation and excessive washing

The primary goal of the present study was to employ confirmatory factor analysis to compare two theoretical models regarding the factor structure of disgust (N=307). The two-factor model of Animal Reminder and Core disgust proposed by Rozin et al. (2000) demonstrated superior model fit over a one-factor model that has been implicated in prior research. However, contrary to theoretical predictions, categorizing Hygiene disgust as Core disgust rather than Animal Reminder disgust provided an overall better fit for the two-factor model. The second aim of the study was to investigate the relationship between the empirically derived two-factor model and contamination ideation and excessive washing using structural equation modeling. Findings indicated that the Contamination Ideation and Excessive Washing latent factor was specifically related to Core disgust (domain specific) and negatively related to Animal Reminder disgust. The relevance of these findings in the context of future research investigating the role of disgust in specific anxiety disorders is discussed.     

Changing Perspective: Building Creative Mindsets

The search for new ideas often frustratingly cycles back to old ones, a phenomenon known as fixation. Recent research has shown ways to kick-start finding new uses for familiar objects, a prototypical creativity task: wandering in the mind or the world or working on a messy desk. Those techniques seem to succeed by helping break fixation, but do not guide the search for new ideas. The perspective-taking or human-centric or empathic mindset championed by many in HCI and in design firms does provide a search strategy. We compared the mind-wandering mindset to a perspective-taking mindset, the latter priming thinking of ways that people in different roles (gardener, artist, etc.) might use the objects. In two studies, the Perspective-Taking mindset yielded more ideas and more original ideas than Mind-Wandering, which did not differ from a No-Mindset control. Original ideas came late, rewarding persistence. The perspective-taking mindset is productive for problem-solving, forecasting, and social interactions as well as innovation.