Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts

From the editors.
The editors acknowledge the journal's reviewers, and give a brief synopsis of the articles in the current issue. Topics covered include the relationship between creativity and mental illness, art students who feel they do not draw well, the music we love and the music we hate, the ability of music to induce happy or sad moods, and the effects of instructing undergraduates to think as if they were 7-year-olds in completing the Torrrance Test of Creative Thinking. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)
A dimensional analysis of creativity and mental illness: Do anxiety and depression symptoms predict creative cognition, creative accomplishments, and creative self-concepts?
The link, if any, between creativity and mental illness is one of the most controversial topics in modern creativity research. The present research assessed the relationships between anxiety and depression symptom dimensions and several facets of creativity: divergent thinking, creative self-concepts, everyday creative behaviors, and creative accomplishments. Latent variable models estimated effect sizes and their confidence intervals. Overall, measures of anxiety, depression, and social anxiety predicted little variance in creativity. Few models explained more than 3% of the variance, and the effect sizes were small and inconsistent in direction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)
Intersections of mathematical, cognitive, and aesthetic theories of mind.
New mathematical and cognitive theories of the mind are connected to psychological theories of aesthetics. I briefly summarize recent revolutionary advancements toward understanding the mind, due to new methods of neuroimaging studies of the brain and new mathematical theories modeling the brain–mind. These new theories describe abilities for concepts, emotions, instincts, imagination, adaptation, and learning. I consider the operation of these mechanisms in the mind hierarchy. I concentrate on the emotions of satisfaction or dissatisfaction related to understanding or misunderstanding of the surrounding world. These emotions are usually below the threshold of conscious registration at lower levels (of object perception). I discuss why, and in what sense, these emotions are aesthetic, I relate them to appraisal emotions, and I argue that at higher levels of abstract cognition these emotions are related to the perception of art. The contents of cognitive representations at the top of the mind hierarchy are analyzed, and aesthetic appraisal emotions at these highest levels are related to emotions of the beautiful. I emphasize that aesthetic emotions, so important in art, are not specific to art but to cognition at the highest levels of the mind hierarchy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)
Art students who cannot draw: Exploring the relations between drawing ability, visual memory, accuracy of copying, and dyslexia.
Some art students, despite being at art school, cannot draw very well, and would like to be able to draw well. It has been suggested that poor drawing may be a particular problem for students with dyslexia (and a high proportion of art school students is dyslexic). In Study 1 we studied 277 art students, using a questionnaire to assess self-perceived drawing ability and a range of background measures, including demography, education, a history of dyslexia, a self-administered spelling test, and personality and educational variables. In Study 2 we gave detailed drawing tests to a sample of 38 of the art students, stratified by self-rated drawing ability and spelling ability, and to 30 control participants. Students perceiving themselves as good at drawing did indeed draw better than self-perceived poor drawers, although the latter were still better than non-art student controls. In neither Study 1 nor Study 2 did skill at drawing relate to dyslexia or spelling ability, and neither did drawing ability relate to any of our wide range of background measures. However Study 2 did show that drawing ability was related both to ability at copying simple angles and proportions (using the “house” task of Cain, 1943), and also to visual memory (as suggested by Jones, 1922), poor drawers being less good at both immediate and delayed recall of the Rey-Osterrieth complex figure. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)
Creative thinking as a predictor of creative problem solving in architectural design students.
The findings demonstrated that creative thinking, operationally defined as the cognitive ability to generate a large number of original ideas/solutions predicted creative thinking in solving problems in architecture. Research participants were 111 students of architectural design. A strong correlation was found between the predictor and criterion measures, r = .45, p <.001. Creative problem solving in architectural design was more highly correlated with the verbal than with the figural component of the creative thinking measure, r = .51, p <.001 and r = .31, p <.005, respectively. The findings suggest the potential benefits of including both domain-general tests of ideational fluency and domain-specific tests of creative thinking in architectural problem solving in admission procedures for departments of architecture. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)
Affective, evaluative, and collative responses to hated and loved music.
This study investigated the effect of some possible predictors of musical preference using participant-selected pieces that were loved or hated. The pieces were played to groups who rated each according to familiarity, quality, preference, as well as emotions felt (internal locus) and emotions expressed (external locus) along the scales of strength, valence, activity, and dominance. The main findings were that good quality was statistically most strongly associated with high preference followed by valence felt, emotional strength felt, and familiarity respectively. The gap across emotion loci (difference between a felt emotion and emotion expressed by the music) was also a significant predictor of preference, with smaller gap preferred. However, analysis of responses by stimulus revealed that the most disliked pieces were highly familiar. Furthermore, although quality strongly matched preference response trends, the quality ratings made by participants did not always comply with conventional views of quality, leading to the speculation that quality and preference share an ontological source and become distinct concepts through social and intellectual filtering. Instances of preference for negative emotion-evoking music were found. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)
Feelings and perceptions of happiness and sadness induced by music: Similarities, differences, and mixed emotions.
The authors examined similarities and differences between (1) listeners’ perceptions of emotions conveyed by 30-s pieces of music and (2) their emotional responses to the same pieces. Using identical scales, listeners rated how happy and how sad the music made them feel, and the happiness and the sadness expressed by the music. The music was manipulated to vary in tempo (fast or slow) and mode (major or minor). Feeling and perception ratings were highly correlated but perception ratings were higher than feeling ratings, particularly for music with consistent cues to happiness (fast-major) or sadness (slow-minor), and for sad-sounding music in general. Associations between the music manipulations and listeners’ feelings were mediated by their perceptions of the emotions conveyed by the music. Happiness ratings were elevated for fast-tempo and major-key stimuli, sadness ratings were elevated for slow-tempo and minor-key stimuli, and mixed emotional responses (higher happiness and sadness ratings) were elevated for music with mixed cues to happiness and sadness (fast-minor or slow-major). Listeners also exhibited ambivalence toward sad-sounding music. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)
Child’s play: Facilitating the originality of creative output by a priming manipulation.
When children play, they often do so in very original ways. However, with the responsibilities of adulthood, this playful curiosity is sometimes lost and conventional responses often result. In the present study, 76 undergraduates were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 conditions before creative performance was assessed in a version of the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT; E. P. Torrance, 1974). In a control condition, participants wrote about what they would do if school was cancelled for the day. In an experimental condition, the instructions were identical except that participants were to imagine themselves as 7-year-olds in this situation. Individuals imagining themselves as children subsequently produced more original responses on the TTCT. Further results showed that the manipulation was particularly effective among more introverted individuals, who are typically less spontaneous and more inhibited in their daily lives. The results thus establish that there is a benefit in thinking like a child to subsequent creative originality, particularly among introverted individuals. The discussion links the findings to mindset factors, play and spontaneity, and relevant personality processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)

Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts - Vol 4, Iss 1