Jeanne Nakamura

Creativity and development

1. Emergence in Creativity and Development 2. Creativity in the Making: Vygotskys Contemporary Contribution to the Dialectic of Development and Creativity 3. The Development of Creativity as a Decision-Making Process 4. The Creation of Multiple-Intelligences Theory: A Study in High-Level Thinking 5. Creativity in Later Life 6. Key Issues in Creativity and Development

Applied Positive Psychology: Improving Everyday Life, Health, Schools, Work, and Society

J.N. Cleveland, E.A. Fleishman, Series Foreword S. Donaldson, M. Seligman, Preface Part 1. Introduction S. Donaldson, Determining What Works, if Anything, in Positive Psychology Part 2. Core Areas in Applied Positive Psychology E.Diener, K. Ryan, National Accounts of Well-Being for Public Policy B.L. Fredrickson, L.E. Kurtz, Cultivating Positive Emotions to Enhance Human Flourishing C. Peterson, N. Park, Character Strengths and Virtues: Their Role in Well-being Part 3. Applications for Improving Health, Education, and Positive Human Development S. Taylor, How Psychosocial Resources Enhance Health and Well-Being N.L. Sin, M. D. Della Porta, S. Lyubomirsky, Tailoring Positive Psychology Interventions to Treat Depressed Individuals H.H. Knoop, Education in 2025: How Positive Psychology can Revitalize Education S.J. Lopez, V.J. Calderon, Gallup Student Poll: Measuring and Promoting What is Right with Students Part 4. Improving Institutions, Organizations, and the World of Work I. Ko, S.I. Donaldson, Applied Positive Organizational Psychology: The State of the Science and Practice J.E. Dutton, L.M. Roberts, J. Bednar, Prosocial Practices, Positive Identity, and Flourishing at Work K.S. Cameron, Effects of Virtuous Leadership on Organizational Performance J. Nakamura, Contexts of Positive Adult Development Part 5. Future Directions for Applying the Science of Positive Psychology M.Csikszentmihalyi, Positive Psychology and a Positive World-View: New Hope for the Future of Humankind S. I. Donaldson, Epilogue: A Practitioners Guide for Applying the Science of Positive Psychology

Mission Possible?: Enabling Good Work in Higher Education

In this article, the authors consider how higher education institutions define and refine missions in times of change. They suggest questions that should be asked when revising an institutional mission statement and consider why a clear mission statement agreed upon by stakeholders is important for focusing the institution and its internal constituents. Also described is their model for using the mission to enable “good work” at the institution.

The Motivational Sources of Creativity as Viewed from the Paradigm of Positive Psychology

Appearing at the dawn of a new paradigm, this volume affords a chance to reflect about the goals of the emerging psychology of strengths, its promise, and its limits. With Seligman, Csikszentmihalyi elsewhere has discussed psychology’s long neglect of positive functioning and identified some of the key problems that a positive psychology ought to address in the coming years (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi 2000). In the present chapter, we draw on work on optimal experience and development, in particular work on creativity, to illustrate the promise of a strengths approach.

Genetic and Environmental Influences on the Relationship between Flow Proneness, Locus of Control and Behavioral Inhibition

Flow is a psychological state of high but subjectively effortless attention that typically occurs during active performance of challenging tasks and is accompanied by a sense of automaticity, high control, low self-awareness, and enjoyment. Flow proneness is associated with traits and behaviors related to low neuroticism such as emotional stability, conscientiousness, active coping, self-esteem and life satisfaction. Little is known about the genetic architecture of flow proneness, behavioral inhibition and locus of control – traits also associated with neuroticism – and their interrelation. Here, we hypothesized that individuals low in behavioral inhibition and with an internal locus of control would be more likely to experience flow and explored the genetic and environmental architecture of the relationship between the three variables. Behavioral inhibition and locus of control was measured in a large population sample of 3,375 full twin pairs and 4,527 single twins, about 26% of whom also scored the flow proneness questionnaire. Findings revealed significant but relatively low correlations between the three traits and moderate heritability estimates of .41, .45, and .30 for flow proneness, behavioral inhibition, and locus of control, respectively, with some indication of non-additive genetic influences. For behavioral inhibition we found significant sex differences in heritability, with females showing a higher estimate including significant non-additive genetic influences, while in males the entire heritability was due to additive genetic variance. We also found a mainly genetically mediated relationship between the three traits, suggesting that individuals who are genetically predisposed to experience flow, show less behavioral inhibition (less anxious) and feel that they are in control of their own destiny (internal locus of control). We discuss that some of the genes underlying this relationship may include those influencing the function of dopaminergic neural systems.

The Role of Emotions in the Development of Wisdom

It is with a slight sense of embarrassment that we embark on this task of writing about wisdom. Although it is clearly the case that one can be immersed in a subject without claiming kinship with it—an entomologist can write about spiders without having to be one—wisdom has an alluring aura suggesting that those who dare to write about it must be to some extent also wise. We would like to relinquish any claims to that effect, at the outset, and, relieved of the burden of appearing wise, start to analyze this important and interesting phenomenon with the conceptual tools of the social sciences.

Pride and the experience of meaning in daily life

To investigate meaning as experienced in daily life, where it has been linked to positive events and emotions, experience-sampling data were used to examine the positive emotion of pride. Recent empirical work emphasizes self-focused, self-enhancing action (i.e. achieving) as a source of pride, but theory suggests that other-focused action (i.e. caring) is also significant. Because work and family are common sources of meaning that offer opportunities to feel pride about both achieving and caring in daily life, working parents (247 mothers and 271 fathers) were studied. Achievement experience and prosocial experience both were associated with pride. However, pride’s comparatively neglected relationship to prosocial experience was even stronger than its relationship to achievement experience, in family life and work life, for women and men. Two recognized sources of meaning – both other-oriented – were associated with experiences of intense pride: being with one’s children and working with clients.

Elevation and mentoring: An experimental assessment of causal relations

Mentoring is a prosocial behavior in which an experienced person guides someone with less experience. Elevation refers to the responses elicited when a person witnesses others upholding the highest standards of moral virtue. Three experimental studies bring these two domains together. For all three studies, participants were randomly assigned to either read a story of someone exhibiting moral excellence or to a control condition. Participants in the elevation condition reported feeling more elevated, more positive attitudes toward mentoring, less negative attitudes toward mentoring, greater intentions to become a mentor (Study 1); an increased proclivity to gather information about becoming a mentor (Study 2a); and, an increased tendency to engage in mentoring directly via submitting advice to students (Study 2b). In their totality, the current studies link another prosocial outcome with elevation and demonstrate a condition under which individuals are more likely to be motivated to become a mentor.

Flow and Leisure

Leisure has eluded definition by social scientists despite decades of theory, research, and applied work on the topic. According to one analysis (Primeau LA, Am J Occup Ther 50:569–577, 1996), there are three prominent ways of defining leisure; as: (a) the residual time available outside of productive and maintenance activity (sometimes simply described as non-work time); (b) the set of activities that people identify as leisure pursuits in a culture, and (c) a positive experiential state whose essence is the experience of being freely chosen and intrinsically rewarding. Each definition has limitations and the lack of consensus has been a challenge for the field of leisure science.

The Group as Mentor

In recent years, several significant studies of creativity have highlighted the importance of apprenticeship experiences in shaping the potential of young scientists, artists, thinkers, performers, and entrepreneurs. Walberg et al. (1980) found that at least two-thirds of their sample of eminent personalities had been exposed to people of distinction in their field during early life experiences. Simonton (1984, 1988) showed that role models, whether impersonal paragons or personal mentors, played an irreplaceable role in the lives of most creative individuals. Feldman (1999) echoed the same point, and Gardner (1993), after reviewing the lives of Freud, Picasso, Einstein, Stravinsky, T. S. Eliot, Martha Graham, and Gandhi, found it inconceivable to envision any mature expert or creator devoid of competent mentoring.