Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts

Editors’ introduction April 2024.
The editors are thrilled to bring to you the April 2024 issue of the journal! This month, they present to you nine articles focusing on topics including cross-cultural and naturalistic studies of viewing artwork, artistic production in various modalities, and creativity in different contexts. The issue begins with four articles on aesthetics; the next two articles highlight linguistic features and how they relate to perception of aesthetic objects; and the final two papers focus on artistic production. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
The influence of culture on the viewing of Western and East Asian paintings.
The influence of British and Chinese culture on the viewing of paintings from Western and East Asian traditions was explored in an old/new discrimination task. Accuracy data were considered alongside signal detection measures of sensitivity and bias. The results showed participant culture and painting tradition interacted but only with respect to response bias and not sensitivity. Eye movements were also recorded during encoding and discrimination. Paintings were split into regions of interest defined by faces, or the theme and context to analyze the eye movement data. With respect to the eye movement data, the results showed that a match between participant culture and painting tradition increased the viewing of faces in paintings at the expense of the viewing of other locations, an effect interpreted as a manifestation of the Other Race Effect on the viewing of paintings. There was, however, no evidence of broader influence of culture on the eye movements made to paintings as might be expected if culture influenced the allocation of attention more generally. Taken together, these findings suggest culture influences the viewing of paintings but only in response to challenges to the encoding of faces. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Presenting TaMuNaBe: A taxonomy of museum navigation behaviors.
In order to accurately study in situ aesthetic responses as participants explore gallery spaces and museum exhibitions, we need a way to comprehensively, exhaustively, and precisely classify the behaviors displayed in such settings. We have restructured and extended a preliminary taxonomy of museum navigation behavior to give it a hierarchical structure and precise behavioral criteria. Our taxonomy features categories for both art related and non-art related eye-gaze behaviors. Art Gazes are further categorized as Orientation behaviors, which do not require bodily movement, or Changing Perspective behaviors, which do require bodily movement. This taxonomy, consisting of 32 different behaviors, was developed using mobile eye-tracking data collected with Tobii glasses at the Pieter Vermeersch exhibition at the M Museum in Leuven. The four-room exhibition featured contemporary artworks primarily consisting of marble slabs painted with color gradients, as well as large, architectural installation features. Three raters coded the mobile eye-tracking recordings according to the taxonomical criteria. Four participants’ gaze data were used to assess interrater reliability, using the correlation between the durations of taxonomical behaviors coded for each participant by each rater (r = .98) and Cohen’s kappa for the agreed number of instances of taxonomical behaviors (k = .67). The taxonomy is both comprehensive and exhaustive in capturing the array of behaviors displayed by participants in the exposition. The use of this taxonomy, or increasingly refined versions of it, will enable us to assess specific behavioral processes which occur in naturalistic museum settings and which may influence aesthetic appreciation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Why Boulder Springs has no boulders and no springs: Evolved landscape preferences and naming conventions.
Landscapes varied throughout human history, some offering more fitness benefits than others. Therefore, natural selection has likely designed in us landscape preferences that motivated us to seek some environments over others (Orians, 1980). These evolved landscape preferences may influence several aspects of modern-day society, including how we manipulate our urban environment. In Study 1, we conducted a content analysis of the naming conventions of apartment buildings and residential neighborhoods. We hypothesized that there would be more nature words (e.g., valley, river, arbor) in apartment and neighborhood names than nonnature words (e.g., 4th Street; Renaissance, Washington). Names of 2,980 apartment buildings and neighborhoods were collected with a program that uses Google Maps from each of the 48 contiguous United States. Results strongly supported our hypothesis; There were 52% more nature words than nonnature words in the names of apartment buildings and residential neighborhoods. Study 2 used a mixed-subjects experimental design to determine if apartments and neighborhoods with nature names were perceived as more valuable than those without nature names. Participants rated five photographs of apartments and five photographs of neighborhoods photoshopped to display nature or nonnature names for their price (in monthly rent or home’s mortgage) and perceived rate of vacancy. Apartments and neighborhoods with manipulated nature names were rated as statistically more expensive. There were no statistical differences between perceived vacancy rates in apartments or neighborhoods named after nature compared with those not named after nature. The current preregistered studies are the first to document that our evolved landscape preferences may affect how developers name our homesteads, further exploiting biophilia. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Green slime and orange blimps: A linguistic analysis of Nickelodeon’s kids’ choice awards.
Building on previous linguistic evaluations of media awards the present study uses integrative complexity (IC)—a rhetorical construct and psycholinguistic variable—to explore Nickelodeon’s Kids’ Choice Awards (KCAs), comparing the dialogue from the winners and nominees. The KCAs represent a unique opportunity for study because (a) although not viewed as prestigious as other awards (e.g., the Academy Awards or Golden Globes), they occupy an established space of cultural relevance, and (b) unlike most media awards, they prioritize kids, who form the voter base. Focusing specifically on the film categories, statistical analysis found significant negative relationships between IC and winning. These results reflect the findings from previous research, indicating that IC meaningfully predicts outcomes for media awards and that a shared psychology in terms of linguistic perception and how it relates to winning media awards may exist. In conjunction with previous research, the present study’s results overall suggest that IC has a place within predictive models used to assess and evaluate entertainment media. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
With, against, or without? Familiarity and copresence increase interactional dissensus and relational plasticity in freely improvising duos.
Agents engaged in creative joint actions might need to find a balance between the demands of doing something collectively, by adopting congruent and interacting behaviors, and the goal of delivering a creative output, which can eventually benefit from disagreements and autonomous behaviors. Here, we investigate this idea in the context of collective free improvisation—a paradigmatic example of group creativity in which musicians aim at creating music that is as complex and unprecedented as possible without relying on predefined plans or individual roles. Controlling for both the familiarity between the musicians and their physical copresence, duos of improvisers were asked to freely improvise together and to individually annotate their performances with a digital interface, indicating at each time whether they were playing with, against, or without their partner. At an individual level, we found that musicians largely intended to converge with their coimproviser, making only occasional use of noncooperative or noninteractive modes such as playing against or playing without. By contrast, at the group level, musicians tended to combine their relational intents in such a way as to create interactional dissensus. We also demonstrate that copresence and familiarity act as interactional smoothers: They increase the agents’ overall level of relational plasticity and allow for the exploration of less cooperative behaviors. Overall, our findings suggest that relational intents might function as a primary resource for creative joint actions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Dual pathways in creative writing processes.
The current study combines 2 related, yet distinct, lines of research demonstrating that (a) creative cognition is supported by both associative and executive abilities (i.e., dual-process perspective), and (b) individual differences may influence creative outcomes through 2 distinct processes (i.e., dual pathway to creativity model). We fill several gaps within both lines of research by examining how individual differences in executive and associative abilities predict creative writing through processes related to persistence and effort. Tasks assessing Cattell–Horn–Carroll (CHC) broad abilities (Gf, Glr, and Gc), semantic distance, and creative writing were administered to a total sample of 209 young adults. A multivariate multiple mediation model in the path analytic framework shows that creativity was directly predicted by an indicator of associative ability (semantic distance) and indirectly predicted by several of the CHC broad cognitive abilities through processes related to persistence and effort (i.e., length of text and time-per-word). Specifically, persistence and effort fully mediated the relationship between creative writing and performance on several tasks assessing fluid reasoning, comprehension knowledge, and long-term storage and retrieval. Together, the model explained 40% of the variance in text length, 33% of time-per-word, and 65% of creativity (Consensual Assessment Technique-based scores). We discuss how these results are not only consistent with previous work demonstrating an association between both executive and associative abilities with creativity, but also provide evidence for the dual pathway model in the generation of creative products and support the role of persistence and effort in creative writing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Awe is associated with creative personality, convergent creativity, and everyday creativity.
Creativity has many benefits, such as workplace performance and life satisfaction. Three studies extended a small body of work to examine whether awe was associated with creative personality, convergent creativity, and everyday creative behaviors (N = 1,844). Study 1 demonstrated that trait awe was associated with a more creative personality among adolescents and adults in the U.S., Iran, and Malaysia. Study 2 showed that trait awe was associated with an increased likelihood of solving the Duncker’s Candle Problem. Finally, Study 3 found that on days when participants felt more daily awe than they typically do, they reported having done more everyday creative activities. The effects of awe were independent of amusement (Studies 1–3) and Big Five personality (Study 3). Moreover, we found that daily curiosity explained the link between daily awe and daily creativity in Study 3. These results are the first to demonstrate a consistent link between awe and complementary measures of creativity. The discussion focuses on the limitations of the present work as well as implications of the present results for future research on awe and creativity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Prosocial motivation and creativity in the arts and sciences: Qualitative and quantitative evidence.
A small but growing body of research suggests that prosocial motivation (i.e., the desire to act for the benefit or welfare of others) may enhance creativity. Most of the relevant research on this topic, however, has focused on creativity in business or everyday life settings. The present studies are the first to examine the nature and potential role of prosocial motivation in the arts and sciences specifically. This project used a qualitative-to-quantitative approach to anchor its operationalization of prosocial motivation in the lived experiences of creators. Study 1, a qualitative study of 56 professional artists and scientists, provided a rich list of self-reported conscious motivations (including prosocial) for creative work in these two domains. Study 2, a cross-sectional study of 972 graduate students in artistic and scientific fields, validated a new self-report scale based on results of Study 1. Factor analyses revealed three types of motivation (prosocial, emotional, intellectual) and one process (sense of audience). Study 2 also showed that associations between these variables and outcomes related to creativity and well-being differed between the arts and sciences. Taken together, results of these studies confirm that prosocial motivation is an important but understudied aspect of creative work. They also highlight the promise of bridging different areas of research in psychology in order to provide a comprehensive examination of potential antecedents and outcomes of creative behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Creative adaptability and emotional well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic: An international study.
The putative associations between creative adaptability and the experience of emotional well-being (i.e., a positivity ratio of more positive than negative emotions) was investigated during the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak with a sample of 1,432 adults from four countries: Israel (n = 310), United States (n = 312), Italy (n = 378), and China (n = 569). Country differences and a mediation model for creative adaptability predicting emotional well-being through creative self-efficacy, resilient coping, and emotion regulation (reappraisal and suppression) were examined. The findings point to slight differences in countries, which are potentially due not only to the culture but also to the phase of the pandemic. More consistently, creative adaptability was positively associated with creative self-efficacy, resilient coping, and reappraisal emotion regulation in all countries. Regarding mediation, in the Israeli, Italian, and Chinese samples, creative adaptability was positively related to resilient coping, which was positively related to emotional well-being. Similar relations were found for creative self-efficacy as a mediator in the United States and Chinese samples. In the Chinese sample, creative adaptability was positively associated with suppression, which was negatively associated with emotional well-being. These results are suggestive of the role of creative adaptability in dealing with the emotional burden associated with the COVID-19 crisis. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)

Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts - Vol 18, Iss 2