The global pandemic has severely disrupted the performing arts sector, with research documenting economic, professional, and health impacts on musicians. The psychological effects of lockdowns have been recognized, but little is known regarding their impact on freelance creative collaborative artists. This qualitative case study uses a resilience…

The authors assert that as the world's population ages, play becomes an underappreciated and underdeveloped opportunity to address many of the challenges associated with growing old. But no systematic examinations exist for the role of play in age-friendly policy. The authors seek to determine the extent to which play has been integrated into such…

Academic underachievement of students from disadvantaged backgrounds is an ongoing problem for Australian schooling. Schools serving these communities face profound challenges in meeting their students' educational needs. "Creative and Embodied" approaches draw on pedagogical practices inherent in Health and Physical Education and the…

Emerging research points to the importance of developing the capacities of teachers to help their students to be creative risk takers and to learn from productive failure. Facilitating this creative risk taking in learners has been shown to require expertise and a degree of risk taking on the part of both teachers and educational leaders. This…

Self@arts is a performing arts programme delivered to Australian Defence Force personnel undergoing rehabilitation for physical and/or psychological injuries. In contrast to the cognitive emphasis within the dominant therapeutic arts model, self@arts provides participants with agency for re-narrating the self through a transformative, ritual…

This research examined the role of touch in creative media production in the context of educational and community makerspaces. Touch, while only recently explored in digital media production, is a crucial perceptive sense through which to experience the world, particularly in two- and three-dimensional making, and to explore texture, temperature,…

Depression is associated with biased interpretations and beliefs that are resistant to change. This kind of cognitive rigidity may depend on two distinct factors--a reduced ability for processing information that conflicts with these interpretations and beliefs and a reduced ability for generating alternative representations. Although depressive…

International students from culturally and linguistically diverse countries travel to Australia because of the opportunity to study courses in the English language with some coming to this country just to study the language itself. Such desires moreover create students to engage in creative strategies to improve their language skills. This paper,…

For higher education graduates to be effective in the workplace, they require strong technical skills and the capability to operate across diverse knowledge landscapes to solve real world problems. At an Australian university, an interdisciplinary, short-term study tour programme was utilised to enhance students' inexplicit employability skills…

Given the Digital Technologies rationale of the Australian Curriculum, it is critical that both teachers and students use design thinking to be creative and innovative producers of digital solutions and knowledge. Teachers and students are increasingly being required to self-produce films and digital content across subject areas. Their productions…

Happiness research is a rapidly-growing area in social psychology and has emphasised the link between happiness and workplace productivity and creativity for knowledge workers. Recent articles in this journal have raised concerns about the level of happiness and engagement of Australian academics with their work, however there is little research…

Australian Outward Bound participants almost universally report their experience in the course as being significant in their lives. The relevance of Outward Bound to the normal progress of life enables it to make significant contributions to society and man's future. An Outward Bound course is designed to encourage students to take responsibility…

We are delighted to welcome you to the International Psychological Applications Conference and Trends (InPACT) 2016, taking place in Lisbon, Portugal, from 30 of April to 2 of May, 2016. Psychology, nowadays, offers a large range of scientific fields where it can be applied. The goal of understanding individuals and groups (mental functions and…