The ‘dark side’ of personal values:relations to clinical constructs and their implications

Personal values are considered as guiding principles in one's life. Much of previous research on values hasconsequently focused on its relations with variables that are considered positive, including subjective well-being, personality traits, or behavior (e.g. health-related). However, in this study (N = 366) the negative‘dark’ side of values is examined. Specifically, the study investigated the relations between Schwartz' (1992)ten value types and four different clinical variables — anxiety, depression, stress, and schizotypy with its subdimensions, unusual experience, cognitive disorganization, introverted anhedonia, and impulsive nonconfor-mity. Positive relations between achievement and depression and stress, and negative relations between anxiety and hedonism and stimulation were predicted and found. Multiple regressions revealed that the ten value typesexplained the most variance in impulsive nonconformity and the least variance in unusual experience. Overall,values were better in predicting more cognitive clinical variables (e.g., cognitive disorganization) whereas clinical constructs were better in predicting more affective values (e.g., hedonism). Implications of the findings for value research are discussed

Creativity Enhancement Methods for Adults: A Meta-Analysis

This meta-analysis synthesizes 332 effect sizes of various methods to enhance creativity. We clustered all studies into twelve methods to identify the most effective creativity enhancement methods. We found that, on average, creativity can be enhanced, Hedges’ g = 0.53, 95%-CI [0.44, 0.61], with 70.09% of the participants in the enhancement conditions being more creative than the average person in the control conditions. Complex training courses, meditation and cultural exposure were most effective (gs = 0.66), while the use of cognitive manipulation drugs was least and also non-effective, g = 0.10. The type of training material was also important. For instance, figural methods were more effective in enhancing creativity, and enhancing converging thinking was more effective than enhancing divergent thinking. Study effect sizes varied considerably across all studies and for many subgroup analyses, suggesting that researchers can plausibly expect to find reversed effects occasionally. We found no evidence of publication bias. We discuss theoretical implications and suggest future directions for best practice in enhancing creativity.Peer Reviewe

Schumpeterian economic dynamics as a quantifiable minimum model of evolution

We propose a simple quantitative model of Schumpeterian economic dynamics. New goods and services are endogenously produced through combinations of existing goods. As soon as new goods enter the market they may compete against already existing goods, in other words new products can have destructive effects on existing goods. As a result of this competition mechanism existing goods may be driven out from the market - often causing cascades of secondary defects (Schumpeterian gales of destruction). The model leads to a generic dynamics characterized by phases of relative economic stability followed by phases of massive restructuring of markets - which could be interpreted as Schumpeterian business `cycles'. Model timeseries of product diversity and productivity reproduce several stylized facts of economics timeseries on long timescales such as GDP or business failures, including non-Gaussian fat tailed distributions, volatility clustering etc. The model is phrased in an open, non-equilibrium setup which can be understood as a self organized critical system. Its diversity dynamics can be understood by the time-varying topology of the active production networks.Comment: 21 pages, 11 figure

Do Digital Jobs Need an Image Filter? Factors Contributing to Negative Attitudes

The rapid expansion of high-speed internet has led to the emergence of new digital jobs, such as digital influencers, fitness models, and adult models who share content on subscription-based social media platforms. Across two experiments involving 1,002 participants, we combined theories from both social psychology and information systems to investigate perceptions of digital jobs compared to matched established jobs, and predictors of attitudes toward digital jobs (e.g., symbolic threat, contact, perceived usefulness). We found that individuals in digital professions were perceived as less favorably and as less hard-working than those in matched established jobs. Digital jobs were also regarded as more threatening to societal values and less useful. The relation between job type and attitudes toward these jobs was partially mediated by contact with people working in these jobs, perceived usefulness, perception of hard-working, and symbolic threat. These effects were consistent across openness to new experiences, attitudes toward digitalization, political orientation, and age. Among the nine jobs examined, lecturers were perceived as the most favorable, while adult models were viewed least favorably. Overall, our findings demonstrate that integrating theories from social psychology and information systems can enhance our understanding of how attitudes are formed.Comment: 32 pages, 2 figure

Farm-to-school nutrition programs with special reference to Egypt and Morocco

The United States’ Farm-To-School Program (F2SP) is a competitive grant program that targets participants of the National School Lunch Program and School Breakfast Program with the aim of increasing the quantity and frequency of locally sourced fruits and vegetables offered to children during the school year. This narrative review aims to summarize the outcomes of the F2SP’s interventions on child health and wellness using the research available to date and provide points to consider when implementing the F2SP outside of the United States, particularly in Egypt and Morocco. Analysis of the existing literature showed that both Egypt and Morocco have been beneficiaries of their aid and have seen improvements in the number of children receiving meals at school. With its centralized school meals system, and with support from the World Food Programme (WFP), Egypt has the infrastructure to set up and sustain a long term F2SP that will enrich local communities, grow local economies, and support the health of the next generation. As the WFP continues its work in Morocco, the focus should be maintained on developing a strong school meals system and addressing immediate food insecurity. The viability of such a program being implemented should be reassessed once outcomes from current hunger relief efforts become available. Additional research is needed to continue to study the feasibility, applicability, and impact of this program, especially as it would be applied in areas with no centralized school meals programs across North Africa

The q-exponential family in statistical physics

The notion of generalised exponential family is considered in the restricted context of nonextensive statistical physics. Examples are given of models belonging to this family. In particular, the q-Gaussians are discussed and it is shown that the configurational probability distributions of the microcanonical ensemble belong to the q-exponential family.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figures, proceedings of SigmaPhi 200

Do student samples provide an accurate estimate of the general public?

Most psychological studies rely on student samples. Students are usually considered as more homogenous than representative samples both within and across countries. However, little is known about the nature of the differences between student and representative samples. This is an important gap, also because knowledge about the degree of difference between student and representative samples may allow to infer from the former to the latter group. Across 59 countries and 12 personality (Big-5) and attitudinal variables we found that differences between students and general public were partly substantial, incoherent, and contradicted previous findings. Two often used cultural variables, embeddedness and intellectual autonomy, failed to explain the differences between both groups across countries. We further found that students vary as much as the general population both between and within countries. In summary, our results indicate that generalizing from students to the general public can be problematic when personal and attitudinal variables are used, as students vary mostly randomly from the general public. Findings are also discussed in terms of the replication crisis within psychology

Nonadditive entropy and nonextensive statistical mechanics - Some central concepts and recent applications

We briefly review central concepts concerning nonextensive statistical mechanics, based on the nonadditive entropy $S_q=k\frac{1-\sum_{i}p_i^q}{q-1} (q \in {\cal R}; S_1=-k\sum_{i}p_i \ln p_i)$. Among others, we focus on possible realizations of the $q$-generalized Central Limit Theorem, including at the edge of chaos of the logistic map, and for quasi-stationary states of many-body long-range-interacting Hamiltonian systems.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figs., to appear in Journal of Physics: Conf.Series (IOP, 2010