Date: Tuesday Sept 30, 2025 at 9am Pacific Daylight Time (PDT)
Guest Speaker: Sandra Russ Distinguished University Professor, Case Western Reserve University
Summary: Pretend play involves accessing and processing emotions, which helps development of creativity, emotion regulation, and well-being. Sandra Russ’ Affect In Play Scale isameans of assessing emotions and imagination in pretend play. Expression of emotions and regulating emotions during pretend play is important for all children, put particularly so in play therapy. Vygotsky had recognized this in his 1932 lecture on the development of “Emotions” as a higher psychological function. This session with Sandra Russ is an opportunity to consider how her contemporary research on affect in children’s play relates to Vygotskian and clinical psychology.
Zoom Link: https://zoom.us/j/98564124237
Meeting ID: 985 6412 4237
Passcode: Vygotsky
Readings:
Russ, S. and Wallace, C. “Pretend Play and Creative Processes” https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1016123.pdf
Fiorelli, J. and Russ, S. ”Pretend Play, Coping, and Subjective Well-Being in Children” https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ985605.pdf
Hoffman, J. and Russ, S. “Pretend Play, Creativity, and Emotion Regulation in Children” https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232559599_Pretend_Play_Creativity_and_Emotion_Regulation_in_Children
Russ, S. (2023). Affect in Pretend Play and Creativity. In Z. Ivcevic, J. Hoffmann, & J. Kaufman (Eds.) The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity and Emotions. (pp. 262-279). Cambridge University Press.
There was a question during Sandra’s presentation about divergent thinking.
In the 1950’s Guilford’s “Structure of Intellect Model” distinguished between convergent thinking (that resulted in finding the answer to a problem) and divergent thinking (the ability to come up with many different ideas). Divergent thinking is considered an aspect of creative thinking. In my presentation on Sept 9, I introduced the topic of how divergent thinking is assessed https://culturalpraxis.net/activities-for-developing-and-assessing-creativity-from-preschool-through-adulthood/
In Sandra’s presentation, she mentioned that neuroimaging methods show an interplay between executive control functions (that direct attention) and mind wandering imaginative functions (Default Mode Network) in creative imagination.
Here is an interesting discussion from a 2021 publication on divergent thinking by Gerwig, et. al. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8167550/
“The focus on executive functions has recently increased due to research with neuroimaging methods (Silvia 2015). There is strong support for a top-down controlled view of cognitive processes in DT tasks. Idea generation appears to be a result of focused internal attention combined with controlled semantic retrieval (Benedek et al. 2014a). In addition, Frith et al. (2020) found that general intelligence and creative thinking overlap not only behaviorally (r = .63; latent variable correlation) but also in terms of functional connectivity patterns at the level of brain networks (i.e., 46% of connections were shared by networks that predicted either general intelligence or creative thinking). Importantly, this overlap of brain networks involved brain regions associated with cognitive control. It is expected that neuroscience research will pursue related lines of research to further unravel the neural basis of DT.”
Sandra Russ sent us these links to studies she mentioned in her presentation:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258144112_A_Cross-Cultural_Comparison_of_Pretend_Play_in_US_and_Italian_Children
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0891422220302523
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221897113_The_Affect_in_Play_Scale_Confirmatory_Factor_Analysis_in_Elementary_School_Children
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/310448408_How_Do_You_Play_A_Comparison_among_Children_Aged_4-10
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0885200613000744
Dear all,
I would like to kindly request that, if possible, simultaneous translation be provided for future group meetings and gatherings. I would like to point out that, when using the Zoom platform, the host who creates the meeting can enable this feature, which would greatly facilitate and make discussions more accessible to all participants. Do you think this is possible?
Thank you very much for your attention.
Certainly worth a try. My concern is that Zoom might not be able to translate the words of speakers who have a heavy foreign accent when speaking English. That part of the discussion might be lost. Chi Zhang is our usual Zoom host, I will ask him if we can do a simultaneous translation on the October 21st presentation by Peter Smagorinsky.