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Objective: College students with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are at increased risk for numerous educational and psychosocial difficulties. This study reports findings from a large, multisite randomized controlled trial examining the efficacy of a treatment for this population, known as ACCESS -- Accessing Campus Connections and Empowering Student Success. Method: ACCESS is a cognitive--behavioral therapy program delivered via group treatment and individual mentoring across two semesters. A total of 250 students (18-30 years of age, 66% female, 6.8% Latino, 66.3% Caucasian) with rigorously defined ADHD and comorbidity status were recruited from two public universities and randomly assigned to receive ACCESS immediately or on a 1-year delayed basis. Treatment response was assessed on three occasions, addressing primary (i.e., ADHD, executive functioning, depression, anxiety) and secondary (i.e., clinical change mechanisms, service utilization) outcomes. Results: Latent growth curve modeling (LGCM) revealed significantly greater improvements among immediate ACCESS participants in terms of ADHD symptoms, executive functioning, clinical change mechanisms, and use of disability accommodations, representing medium to large effects (Cohen's d, 0.39 - 1.21). Across these same outcomes, clinical significance analyses using reliable change indices (RCI; Jacobson & Truax, 1992) revealed significantly higher percentages of ACCESS participants showing improvement. Although treatment-induced improvements in depression and anxiety were not evident from LGCM, RCI analyses indicated that immediate ACCESS participants were less likely to report a worsening in depression/anxiety symptoms. Conclusions: Findings from this RCT provide strong evidence in support of the efficacy and feasibility of ACCESS as a treatment for young adults with ADHD attending college.

The present research examined the varieties of poor metaphors to gain insight into the cognitive processes involved in generating creative ones. Drawing upon data from two published studies as well as a new sample, adults' open-ended responses to different metaphor prompts were categorized. Poor metaphors fell into two broad clusters. Non-metaphors--responses that failed to meet the basic task requirements--consisted of "adjective slips" (describing the topic adjectivally instead of figuratively), "wayward attributes" (attributing the wrong property to the topic), and "off-topic idioms" (describing the wrong topic). Bad metaphors--real metaphors that were unanimously judged as uncreative--consisted of "exemplary exemplars" (vehicles that lacked semantic distance and thus seemed trite) and "retrieved clichés" (pulling a dead metaphor from memory). Overall, people higher in fluid intelligence (Gf) were more likely to generate a real metaphor, and their metaphor was less likely to be a bad one. People higher in Openness to Experience, in contrast, were more likely to generate real metaphors but not more or less likely to generate bad ones. Scraping the bottom of the response barrel suggests that creative metaphor production is a particularly complex form of creative thought.

Studies of everyday creativity suggest that some people are like creative omnivores, dabbling in a broad range of creative pursuits, but others are like picky eaters, focusing on a single creative passion. A week-long experience sampling study examined the breadth vs depth of 125 university students' everyday creative activities. Several times a day, people were asked if they were doing something creative, and if they were, to describe what they were doing. Diversity statistics quantified the variety (number of distinct domains) and balance (the relative predominance of any domain) of their creative activities. The sample varied widely in both aspects of diversity, reflecting differences in whether people's creative efforts were relatively broad or focused. Notably, people who were high in openness to experience showed significantly higher variety (they did more kinds of creative activities) yet lower balance (one or two activities predominated), suggesting that they had a broad creative diet but a few favorite foods.

The original 90-item Creative Behavior Inventory (CBI) was a landmark self-report scale in creativity research, and the 28-item brief form developed nearly 20 years ago continues to be a popular measure of everyday creativity. Relatively little is known, however, about the psychometric properties of this widely used scale. In the current research, we conduct a detailed psychometric investigation into the 28-item CBI by applying methods from item response theory using a sample of 2,082 adults. Our investigation revealed several strengths of the current scale: excellent reliability, suitable dimensionality, appropriate item difficulty, and reasonably good item discrimination. Several areas for improvement were highlighted as well: (1) the four-point response scale should have fewer options; (2) a handful of items showed gender-based differential item functioning, indicating some gender bias; and (3) local dependence statistics revealed clusters of items that are redundant and could be trimmed. These analyses support the continued use of the CBI for assessing engagement in everyday creative behaviors but suggest that the CBI could benefit from thoughtful revision.

The worst performance rule (WPR) is a robust empirical finding reflecting that people's worst task performance shows numerically stronger correlations with cognitive ability than their average or best performance. However, recent meta-analytic work has proposed this be renamed the "not-best performance" rule because mean and worst performance seem to predict cognitive ability to similar degrees, with both predicting ability better than best performance. We re-analyzed data from a previously published latent-variable study to test for worst vs. not-best performance across a variety of reaction time tasks in relation to two cognitive ability constructs: working memory capacity (WMC) and propensity for task-unrelated thought (TUT). Using two methods of assessing worst performance--ranked-binning and ex-Gaussian-modeling approaches--we found evidence for both the worst and not-best performance rules. WMC followed the not-best performance rule (correlating equivalently with mean and longest response times (RTs)) but TUT propensity followed the worst performance rule (correlating more strongly with longest RTs). Additionally, we created a mini-multiverse following different outlier exclusion rules to test the robustness of our findings; our findings remained stable across the different multiverse iterations. We provisionally conclude that the worst performance rule may only arise in relation to cognitive abilities closely linked to (failures of) sustained attention.

The 20-item Self-reflection and Insight Scale (SRIS) is a widely used measure of individual differences in self-focused attention and private self-consciousness. In the present research, we examined the validity of a 12-item short form of the SRIS, which was recently developed based on item response theory models. Measures related to mental health and well-being were used as criteria for evaluating the relative effect sizes for the long and short SRIS. In Study 1 (n = 278 adults), the short and long SRIS scores had highly similar correlations with dimensional measures of depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms as well as with neuroticism. In Study 2 (n = 78 adults), participants were classified into major depression and healthy control groups based on structured clinical interviews. The short and long SRIS had similar profiles of differences between the two groups. Taken together, the studies suggest that the short forms effectively recover the effect sizes of the long forms, so the briefer SRIS would be a good option when time and survey space are tight., Author(s): Paul J. Silvia [sup.1] , Kari M. Eddington [sup.1] , Kelly L. Harper [sup.2] , Thomas R. Kwapil [sup.1] [sup.3] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.266860.c, 0000 0001 0671 255X, Department [...]

The human ability for self-consciousness-the capacity to reflect on oneself and to think about one's thoughts, experiences, and actions-is central to understanding personality and motivation. The present research examined the psychometric properties of the Self-reflection and Insight Scale (SRIS), a prominent self-report scale for measuring individual differences in private self-consciousness. Using tools from Rasch and item response theory models, the SRIS was evaluated using responses from a large sample of young adults (n = 1192). The SRIS had many strengths, including essentially zero gender-based differential item functioning (DIF), but a cluster of poor performing items was identified based on item misfit, high local dependence, and low item difficulty and discrimination. Based on the IRT analyses, a concise 12-item scale, evenly balanced between self-reflection and insight, was crafted. The short SRIS showed strong dimensionality, reliability, item fit, and local independence as well as essentially no gender DIF. Taken together, the many psychometric strengths of the SRIS support its popularity, and the short form will be useful for research and applied contexts where an efficient, concise version is needed., Author(s): Paul J. Silvia [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.266860.c, 0000 0001 0671 255X, Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, , P.O. Box 26170, 27402-6170, Greensboro, NC, USA [...]

In the large literature on creativity and mental illness, relatively few studies have explored anhedonia--impairments in anticipating, seeking, and experiencing rewards. This project explored self-reported creativity in a sample of adults who differed in depressive anhedonia, determined via face-to-face structured clinical interviews. Participants completed measures of everyday creativity (engaging in common creative behaviors and hobbies), creative self-concepts (creative self-efficacy, creative personal identity, and self-rated creativity in different domains), and creative achievements. Compared to the control group (n = 52), people in the anhedonia group (n = 22) had significantly higher engagement in little-c creative activities (medium effect size). Effect sizes for self-rated creativity and creative achievement were either small or near-zero. Taken together, the findings suggest that anhedonia deserves more attention in future research on motivational aspects of creativity.

Increasing research efforts are focused on explaining the cognitive bases of creativity. However, it remains unclear when and how cognitive factors such as intelligence and executive function uniquely contribute to performance on creative thinking tasks. Although a relationship between fluid intelligence (Gf) and creative cognition has been well-documented, the underlying mechanism of this relation is unknown. Here, we test one possible mechanism of the Gf--creativity association -- attention control (AC) -- given AC's strong association with Gf and its theoretical relevance to creative cognition. We also examine the role of mind wandering (i.e., task-unrelated thought), a failure of AC that is potentially beneficial to creativity. Using latent variable and bifactor models, we investigated the unique contributions of AC to divergent thinking -- above the influence of "Gf" -- evaluating the specific and general contributions of AC, "Gf," and mind wandering to divergent thinking. We found that a general executive factor (i.e., of the common variance to AC, mind wandering, and Gf indicators) significantly predicted divergent thinking originality ([beta] =0.40, p <0.001) above and beyond specific Gf and mind wandering factors. Importantly, in the bifactor model, mind wandering was a nonsignificant, negative predictor of divergent thinking performance, and the residual effects of "Gf" were no longer significant, indicating that the relationship between "Gf" and divergent thinking is explained by shared variance with a common executive attention factor. This study provides novel evidence suggesting that the relationship between Gf and divergent thinking may be largely driven by the top-down control of attention.

AbstractVirtual art galleries represent a rapidly growing and potentially unique context for art engagement, but little is known about the psychological nature of these experiences. To better characterize virtual art gallery visits, we quantified a set of in-depth behaviors related to art viewing, navigation, and intensive art engagement in a virtual gallery. Data included coordinate position and gaze proxy data, recorded from 264 unconstrained participant visits to a virtual gallery that contained 24 diverse artworks curated throughout 3 rooms. Nine classified visit behaviors—related to the overall visit, navigation, art viewing, and deep engagement—were used in a latent class analysis as indicators for estimating possible visitor engagement classes. The analysis resulted in a 4-class model which classified visitors as disengaged, typical, engaged, and revisitors. Finally, we examined how each class differed in terms of their art knowledge, personality, and other individual differences. Significant differences were found for several variables, including aesthetic fluency, openness to experience, extraversion, age, and nausea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do people come up with humorous ideas? In creative cognition research, exposure to good examples sometimes causes fixation (people get "stuck" on the examples) but other times sparks inspiration (people's responses are more creative). The present research examined the effects of funny and unfunny examples on joke production. A sample of 175 adults read scenarios that they completed with funny responses. All participants were instructed to be funny, but before responding they read (a) funny responses as examples of good responses to emulate, (b) unfunny responses as examples of poor responses to avoid, or (c) no examples. The participants' own responses were rated for funniness and for similarity to the example responses, and response times were recorded. Reading either funny or unfunny examples, compared to no examples, caused people to come up with funnier jokes. Similarity to the examples was low in all conditions, so fixation was relatively modest, but people who saw unfunny examples spent more time coming up with their responses. Taken together, the findings support the growing literature showing that examples are often inspiring rather than constraining, and they imply that good and bad examples spark creative thought via different paths.

The Aesthetic Responsiveness Assessment (AReA) is a self-report scale for measuring individual differences in the strength of responses to art objects and events. Its 14 items sort into three subscales: aesthetic appreciation (AA), intense aesthetic experience (IAE), and creative behaviour. The present research evaluated the dimensionality of the AReA using tools from network psychometrics, particularly bootstrap exploratory graph analysis. Using a sample of English-speaking adults (n = 1071), the network analyses closely replicated the number and item composition of the AReA subscales, but one of the items—a cross-loaded item proposed to be in both the AA and IAE subscales—was not replicated. Using the bootstrap sampling distributions, we suggest item assignments that avoid awkward dual-loadings and provide a simpler dimensional structure. Taken together, the results reveal clear strengths of the AReA and illustrate how emerging network tools can illuminate and guide psychometric decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study explored how personality shapes encounters with art within a virtual art gallery. An online sample of 264 adults completed questionnaires before freely wandering around a virtual gallery, which spanned three rooms and contained 24 artworks (half abstract, half representational) of various sizes and genres. We examined how the Big Five personality traits, aesthetic fluency, and aesthetic responsiveness predicted visit behavior: overall visit time, distance traveled in the gallery, the proportion of time spent viewing artwork, and how long and from what distance people viewed each individual artwork. Openness to experience had widespread effects on virtual visit behaviors, followed by extraversion, and variation in artwork features (area and abstraction) predicted viewing time and distance for individual artworks. We discuss how virtual galleries may contribute to understanding both traditional museum visitors and the emerging study of online virtual visitors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The association between working memory capacity (WMC) and the antisaccade task, which requires subjects to move their eyes and attention away from a strong visual cue, supports the claim that WMC is partially an attentional construct (Kane, Bleckley, Conway, & Engle, 2001; Unsworth, Schrock, & Engle, 2004). Specifically, the WMC-antisaccade relation suggests that WMC helps maintain and execute task goals despite interference from habitual actions. Related work has recently shown that mind wandering (McVay & Kane, 2009, 2012a, 2012b) and reaction time (RT) variability (Unsworth, 2015) are also related to WMC and they partially explain WMC's prediction of cognitive abilities. Here, we tested whether mind-wandering propensity and intraindividual RT variation account for WMC's associations with 2 antisaccade-cued choice RT tasks. In addition, we asked whether any influences of WMC, mind wandering, or intraindividual RT variation on antisaccade are moderated by (a) the temporal gap between fixation and the flashing location cue, and (b) whether targets switch sides on consecutive trials. Our quasi-experimental study reexamined a published dataset (Kane et al., 2016) comprising 472 subjects who completed 6 WMC tasks, 5 attentional tasks with mind-wandering probes, 5 tasks from which we measured intraindividual RT variation, and 2 antisaccade tasks with varying fixation-cue gap durations. The WMC-antisaccade association was not accounted for by mind wandering or intraindividual RT variation. WMC's effects on antisaccade performance were greater with longer fixation-to-cue intervals, suggesting that goal activation processes--beyond the ability to control mind wandering and RT variability--are partially responsible for the WMC-antisaccade relation.