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Editors’ introduction April 2024.
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, Vol 18(2), Apr 2024, 119-120; doi:10.1037/aca0000696The 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...
Source: Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts - April 15, 2024 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

When rule breaking in art falls flat: Cultural tightness deflates deviant artists’ impact.
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, Vol 18(1), Feb 2024, 14-30; doi:10.1037/aca0000650Previous research in western countries shows that artists whose work deviates from their own previous style (intrapersonal deviance) and other artists’ styles (interpersonal deviance) gain greater impact than nondeviant artists (Stamkou et al., 2018). However, aesthetic norms are embedded in cultural contexts that shape the meaning of artist deviance. Deviance is compatible with the ideal of innovation endorsed by loose cultures, yet incongruent with the ideal of conformity prominent in tight cultures. Here we examine ho...
Source: Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts - February 29, 2024 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Editors’ introduction to part 2 of the special issue on racial and cultural issues.
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, Vol 18(1), Feb 2024, 1-2; doi:10.1037/aca0000680With thanks for their generous readers’ understanding for the delay, the editors are thrilled to present their Part 2 for the special issue of Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. In Part 2, they focus on marginalized and traditionally underserved communities and topics, including people experiencing incarceration, colonialized African music traditions, Black music students, and deviant artists. They also look deeply into cross-cultural work across a variety of domains, including Confucian concepts of creati...
Source: Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts - February 29, 2024 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Lofty aims, limited actors, fewer artifacts: A sociocultural analysis of Confucian conceptions of creativity and innovation.
This article investigated Confucian conceptions of creativity and innovation from a sociocultural perspective using Glăveanu’s Five A framework. Confucian aims of creation and innovation were lofty, but the range of people who could create was exclusionary, pathways to creative achievements were relatively narrow, and thus fewer creative artifacts were produced by Confucians. At the same time, Confucian thought contains a more nuanced conceptualization of both appropriateness/usefulness and aim/purpose than is found in contemporary, largely Western approaches to creativity and innovation. Based on the conceptual analysi...
Source: Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts - February 8, 2024 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Cultural frame-dependent differences in artistic appraisals between White and Black Americans.
In this study, we investigated the framing effect of cultural origin on artistic appraisals in 410 participants from the United States. All participants were recruited online and assigned to one of three groups which varied by artists’ perceived culture of origin (American, European, or African). All stimuli consisted of equal numbers of abstract and representational artworks by African artists. The artists’ name was manipulated and used as a proxy for culture of origin. For the African condition artists’ original names were presented, while the other two conditions were presented with pseudonyms. Participants evalua...
Source: Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts - December 14, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Editor’s introduction December 2023.
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, Vol 17(6), Dec 2023, 673-674; doi:10.1037/aca0000669In this article, the authors note that they had promised Part 2 of the special issue on Racial and Cultural Issues in December, but it’s now scheduled to be published in the next issue, in February 2024. They needed a bit more time to ensure that all had time to be proofed, set, and ready for publication. In its place, they now have a standard issue for December 2023. This month, they present 10 articles focusing on topics including musical abilities and performance, creativity and its relationship with other construct...
Source: Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts - December 14, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Does flower preference differ across cultures? A study of Czech and Kenyan populations.
This study compares the flower preferences of the inhabitants of two culturally, geographically, and ecologically highly distinct countries—Czechia (n = 54 and n = 48) and Kenya (n = 54). We asked each subject to rank photographs of 40 species of Czech flowers from the most liked one to the least liked one. We then computed the mean ranking of each flower species in the Kenyan and Czech samples and compared them. We found a very strong positive correlation (r = .79 and r = .77) between the samples, suggesting that Czechs and Kenyans prefer the same flowers. This concordance was unexpected, especially given the small samp...
Source: Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts - November 27, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Were they appealing to the sun? On why cones and tetrahedra were so popular at the dawn of civilization.
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, Vol 18(1), Feb 2024, 92-104; doi:10.1037/aca0000619Tokens refer to ancient bead-sized, usually clay, usually simple-geometric artifacts with no evident function other than counting. People produced tokens for five millennia across west Asia preceding the earliest systematized writing (ca. 3300 BCE), proto-cuneiform of Sumer (southern Iraq). Of the 8,000+ tokens Schmandt-Besserat (1992) documented, the seven most frequent by descending frequency were sphere, cone, disk, cylinder, rectangle, triangle, and tetrahedron. Five-sided pyramids were rare. Scholars have always assu...
Source: Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts - November 13, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Editor’s introduction.
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, Vol 17(5), Oct 2023, 539-540; doi:10.1037/aca0000653This issue of Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts begins with two articles on film. In the first, Armstrong and Cutting take a new approach to the study of emotional responses to film: the physical structure of the movie itself. In the second article on film, Langkjær and colleagues also looked at cuts in film, specifically matching action cuts, to investigate how the human perceptual system engages and handles disjointed moving images. Next, are four articles on music. First, Merrill and Ackermann focuse...
Source: Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts - October 2, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Multilingual semantic distance: Automatic verbal creativity assessment in many languages.
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, Vol 17(4), Aug 2023, 495-507; doi:10.1037/aca0000618Creativity research commonly involves recruiting human raters to judge the originality of responses to divergent thinking tasks, such as the alternate uses task (AUT). These manual scoring practices have benefited the field, but they also have limitations, including labor-intensiveness and subjectivity, which can adversely impact the reliability and validity of assessments. To address these challenges, researchers are increasingly employing automatic scoring approaches, such as distributional models of semantic distance....
Source: Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts - September 14, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Editors’ Introduction to Part 1 of the Special Issue on Racial and Cultural Issues.
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, Vol 17(4), Aug 2023, 395-397; doi:10.1037/aca0000630The articles in this first issue represent excellent submissions that cover a broad spectrum of theoretical and methodological examinations of the ways in which race and culture impact our understanding and scientific exploration of aesthetics, creativity, and the arts. We begin this Special Issue with a series of studies that examined cross-cultural differences in how we view and appreciate visual art. In an interesting contribution to this question, Brinkmann and colleagues examined whether Austrian and Japanese observ...
Source: Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts - September 14, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Impact of a mindfulness-based program on creativity and mindfulness disposition of school children.
This study examined the efficacy of a mindfulness and art-based training program on the creativity and mindfulness disposition of primary school children. A total of 132 school children ages between 7 and 10 years were randomly assigned to an experimental group (N = 60) or a control group (N = 72). The intervention program included six sessions, each lasting 90 min. Two instruments were administered both pre- and posttests: the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire and the Test for Creative Thinking-Drawing Production. A group comparison design with pre- and postassessments was used. The results showed significant differenc...
Source: Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts - September 4, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Racial-ethnic minority participants in the marching arts: Intergroup experiences, perceptions of inclusion, and well-being.
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, Vol 18(1), Feb 2024, 74-82; doi:10.1037/aca0000614The marching arts (MA) are an understudied art form involving both music and dance, which has been cited as an inclusive space for all, despite little to no work directly investigating racial-ethnic marching minority members’ intergroup experiences. As such, the purpose of this study was to empirically assess racial minority members’ intergroup experiences in the MA and if such experiences were related to their well-being. We conducted an online survey of 174 self-identified members of ethnic-racial minority groups in ...
Source: Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts - July 20, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

An opportunity to find oneself at the end of a paintbrush: Exploration of an artist-led prison intervention model bringing people from prison and local community together.
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, Vol 18(1), Feb 2024, 3-13; doi:10.1037/aca0000589A growing body of research has explored the contribution of prison art interventions indicating that these hold substantial rehabilitative value. Recent literature in this area has drawn attention to the need to expand social action and community-enhanced art interventions with the aim of aiding incarcerated individuals to reconnect to the community. The following research focused on a unique artist-led prison intervention model, wherein participants who are currently imprisoned create alongside participants who are art stu...
Source: Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts - July 13, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

The functional connectivity basis of multicultural experience and its relationship with domain-specific creativity.
In this study, we selected the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), inferior parietal lobule, and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) as the regions of interest according to the social cognition system (self-representation) and nonsocial system (cognitive closure) in culture. Furthermore, we used a seed-based connectivity approach with the resting-state functional MRI (rsFC) method to explore the neural basis of ME and its relationship with domain-specific creativity in 232 college students. The behavioral results showed that ME was positively correlated with domain-specific creativity in visual arts, dance, music, creative ...
Source: Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts - June 22, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research