Publications by authors named "Robert J Sternberg"

This essay questions the framing of socioemotional development as a separate concomitant of cognitive development in gifted individuals. Rather, it argues, first, that socioemotional development of the gifted is not separate from giftedness. Second, socioemotional development is not even cleanly and clearly separable from cognitive development.

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Technology alters both perceptions of human intelligence and creativity and the actual processes of intelligence and creativity. Skills that were once important for human intelligence, for example, computational ones, no longer hold anywhere near the same importance they did before the age of computers. The advantage of computers is that they may lead us to focus on what we believe to be more important things than what they have replaced.

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A successful adjustment to dynamic changes in one's environment requires contingent adaptive behaviour. Such behaviour is underpinned by cognitive flexibility, which conceptually is part of fluid intelligence. We argue, however, that conventional approaches to measuring fluid intelligence are insufficient in capturing cognitive flexibility.

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This study provides an empirical test of a previously proposed assertion that intelligence as adaptation has an attitudinal as well as an ability component. The ability component deals with what the basic knowledge and skills are that underlie intelligence, and how much of each one an individual has. The attitudinal component deals with how an individual chooses to deploy the abilities they have.

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Courage is one of the most significant psychological constructs for society, but not one of the most frequently studied. This paper presents a process model of courage consisting of decision-based pathways by which one comes to enact a courageous action. We argue the process of courage begins with a trigger involving an actor(s) and a situation(s).

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Cultural intelligence is one's ability to adapt when confronted with problems arising in interactions with people or artifacts of cultures other than one's own. In this study, we explored two maximum-performance tests of cultural intelligence. One, used in previous research, measured cultural intelligence in the context of an individual conducting a business trip in another culture.

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Article Synopsis
  • Love significantly influences personal relationships, making it essential to have an accurate way to measure love experiences.
  • The original tool for measuring love, Sternberg's Triangular Love Scale (TLS-45), assesses intimacy, passion, and commitment, but many studies use shorter versions.
  • Researchers created the TLS-15, a validated, reliable short version of the scale, which proved effective across various cultures and offers a consistent measure of love’s components globally.
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Recent cross-cultural and neuro-hormonal investigations have suggested that love is a near universal phenomenon that has a biological background. Therefore, the remaining important question is not whether love exists worldwide but which cultural, social, or environmental factors influence experiences and expressions of love. In the present study, we explored whether countries' modernization indexes are related to love experiences measured by three subscales (passion, intimacy, commitment) of the Triangular Love Scale.

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Intelligence, like creativity and wisdom, has an attitudinal component as well as an ability-based one. The attitudinal component is at least as important as the ability-based one. Theories of intelligence, in ignoring the attitudinal component of intelligence, have failed to account fully or accurately for why so many people who have relatively high levels of intelligence as an ability fail fully to deploy their ability, especially toward positive ends.

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Criterion-referenced testing is usually applied to the assessment of achievement. In this article, we suggest how it can also be applied to the assessment of adaptive intelligence, that is, intelligence as adaptation to the environment. In the era of the Anthropocene, we argue that adaptive intelligence is what is most important not only for individual success, but also for success in terms of preservation of the world as we know it.

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We administered both maximum-performance and typical-performance assessments of cultural intelligence to 114 undergraduates in a selective university in the Northeast of the United States. We found that cultural intelligence could be measured by both maximum-performance and typical-performance tests of cultural intelligence. Cultural intelligence as assessed by a maximum-performance measure is largely distinct from the construct as assessed by a typical-performance measure.

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We review the musical conservatory as a model for educators to learn how to enhance admissions, instruction, and assessment in liberal arts collegiate settings. Although conservatories serve primarily students wishing to enter musical careers of various kinds, the model on which they are based can, in many ways, serve any student and any school. We review some of the history of conservatories and describe how they work.

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This article discusses the issues of the basic processes underlying intelligence, considering both historical and contemporary perspectives. The attempt to elucidate basic processes has had, at best, mixed success. There are some problems with pinpointing the underlying basic processes of intelligence, both in theory and as tested, such as what constitutes a basic process, what constitutes intelligence, and whether the processes, basic or not, are the same across time and space (cultural contexts).

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This article explores the advantages of viewing intelligence not as a fixed trait residing within an individual, but rather as a person × task × situation interaction. The emphasis in the article is on the role of persons solving tasks embedded in situations involving learning, intellectual abilities, and competencies. The article opens with a consideration of the role of situations in intelligent behavior.

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Cultural intelligence is one's ability to adapt when confronted with problems arising in interactions with people or artifacts of diverse cultures. In this study, we conduct an initial construct-validation and assessment of a maximum-performance test of cultural intelligence. We assess the psychometric properties of the test and also correlate the test with other measures with which it might be expected there would be some connection.

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This article introduces a 6P framework for understanding intelligence, as well as the theories and tests that are derived from it. The 6Ps in the framework are purpose, press, problems, persons, processes, and products underlying intelligence. Each of the 6Ps is considered in turn.

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A deeper understanding of the processes leading to problem framing and behind finding solutions to problems should help explain variability in the quality of the solutions to those problems. Using Sternberg's WICS model as the conceptual basis of problem solving, this article discusses the relations between creative, analytical, practical, and wisdom-based approaches as bases for solutions to problems. We use a construct of to encompass understanding, control, and coordination between these constructs.

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The late James Flynn, to whom this Special Issue is dedicated, suggested that what will matter most to the future of the world is not levels of intelligence but rather how intelligence is deployed. In this article, I argue that we can distinguish between transactional and transformational deployments of intelligence. Loosely following Flynn, I suggest that we need to pay much more attention to the latter rather than the former.

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I present a theory of adaptive intelligence and discuss why I believe adaptive intelligence, rather than general intelligence, is the kind of intelligence upon which we should focus in today's world. Adaptive intelligence is the ability to adapt to, shape, and select real-world environments in ways that result in positive outcomes not only for oneself, but also for others and the world. Edward Zigler was among the first to recognize the importance of levels of adaptation to intellectual deficiency, arguing from early on that intellectual challenges needed to be recognized not just in terms of IQ but also in terms of adaptive functioning.

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The Triangular Theory of Love (measured with Sternberg's Triangular Love Scale - STLS) is a prominent theoretical concept in empirical research on love. To expand the culturally homogeneous body of previous psychometric research regarding the STLS, we conducted a large-scale cross-cultural study with the use of this scale. In total, we examined more than 11,000 respondents, but as a result of applied exclusion criteria, the final analyses were based on a sample of 7332 participants from 25 countries (from all inhabited continents).

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Although early-life adversity can undermine healthy development, children growing up in harsh environments may develop intact, or even enhanced, skills for solving problems in high-adversity contexts (i.e., "hidden talents").

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In many nations, grades and standardized test scores are used to select students for programs of scientific study. We suggest that the skills that these assessments measure are related to success in science, but only peripherally in comparison with two other skills, scientific creativity and recognition of scientific impact. In three studies, we investigated the roles of scientific creativity and recognition of scientific impact on scientific thinking.

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David Geary (2019) has written a summary of his fascinating article on the purported role of the mitochondria in the development of intelligence (Geary 2018) [...

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Intelligence typically is defined as consisting of "adaptation to the environment" or in related terms. Yet, it is not clear that "general intelligence" or traditionally conceptualized in terms of a general factor in a psychometrically-based hierarchical model of intelligence, provides an optimal way of defining intelligence as adaptation to the environment. Such a definition of adaptive intelligence would need to be biologically based in terms of evolutionary theory, would need to take into account the cultural context of adaptation, and would need to take into account whether thought and behavior labeled as "adaptively intelligent" actually contributed to the perpetuation of the human and other species, or whether it was indifferent or actually destructive to this perpetuation.

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