Early Career Research Micro-Grants

Anna S. Caruso, George Mason University

Imaginative Resistance and Diverse Narrative Engagement: A Developmental Approach

Narratives are fundamental to how people learn about the world. However, limits on engagement with narratives can occur when they cross pre-held moral or aesthetic boundaries, called "imaginative resistance." This mixed-methods study will examine how and when imaginative resistance is displayed in children (aged 8-10) and adults when asked to read, write, watch, or act out a morally deviant or neutral narrative. Findings will expand imaginative resistance knowledge into the developmental domain, separate the effects of passive and active engagement, and explore morality in narrative arts.

Paolo Barbieri, University of Turin

The Aesthetic Valve: An Electrophysiological Investigation of the Relationship Between Aesthetic Appreciation, Anxiety and Curiosity.

A growing body of research suggests that increasing sensory unpredictability tends to elicit anxiety and frustration, whereas manageable unpredictability promotes curiosity and engagement. This project aims to conduct a systematic electrophysiological investigation of the neural underpinnings of the affective-state spectrum ranging from anxiety to curiosity elicited by music listening. Participants will be presented with six atonal musical pieces while neural activity is recorded both during music listening and during an implicit learning task.

Giacomo Bignardi, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

The Genetic Architecture and Evolution of Music-Evoked Emotions

How can organized frequencies evoke emotions? This project investigates this question by examining genetic influences on individuals' sensitivity to music-evoked emotions. It will collect new data on music-evoked emotional responses in genetically informative samples and provide an initial characterization of their genetic architecture by identifying associations with both common and rare DNA variants across culturally diverse populations. The resulting discoveries will offer insight into the biology and evolutionary origins of emotional reactions to music and lay the groundwork for exploring how music-evoked emotions connect to broader aspects of human cognition and behavior.

Shengjie Lin, University of New Mexico

From Beliefs to Behaviors: Development of a Vignette-Based Creative Mindset Behavior Instrument

Creative mindset beliefs play a critical role in creative problem solving, creative activities, and achievement; however, little is known about how these beliefs are expressed through observable behaviors. This project shifts the focus from beliefs to creative mindset behaviors, capturing how mindsets are enacted in everyday contexts. The first goal is to identify specific behaviors that reflect creative fixed and growth mindsets. Building on this, the project will develop a vignette-based instrument to assess these behaviors, aiming to reduce social desirability bias and capture responses across ecologically diverse creative scenarios.

Ji Hoon Park, Pace University

Creativity and Critical Thinking in the Age of AI: A Cross-Cultural Study of Education in the 21st Century

The rise of artificial intelligence marks a profound shift in education. Advocates see opportunities for efficiency, enhanced creativity, and innovative teaching, while critics worry about ethical concerns, diminished creativity, and reduced critical thinking. This project will investigate how stakeholders in education perceive the integration of AI in schools, with a focus on its impact on students' creativity and critical thinking. Importantly, this study will examine how cultural background (U.S. vs. China) and individual differences in educators' own creativity and critical thinking shape openness or resistance toward AI in education.

Tuval Raz, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology

Do More Creative and Complex Questions Lead to Better Grades? Comparing the Effect of General and Domain-Specific Question-Asking Interventions on Educational Outcomes

This longitudinal research will investigate whether training undergraduate students to ask more complex, creative questions relevant to their learning improves educational outcomes. Utilizing a randomized controlled trial over the course of an academic year, the study will compare a control group against an experimental group receiving question-asking interventions based on Bloom's Taxonomy and real-time AI feedback via a question coaching tool. The project aims to demonstrate that higher-level inquiry is a trainable skill that significantly enhances academic performance, creativity, and problem-solving abilities.

Yuyang Shen, University of North Texas

Automated Creativity Assessment and Feedback: Understanding the Role of Feedback Type in Fostering Student Creativity

This study will investigate how AI-generated feedback influences creativity in verbal and figural divergent thinking tasks. Grounded in cognitive evaluation theory, we will test whether automated feedback acts as a verbal reward to enhance creative performance, creative self-efficacy, and intrinsic motivation. Two hundred college students will be randomly assigned to receive one of four feedback types—evaluative, informative, positive, or negative—or no feedback while completing online tasks. Real-time feedback will be delivered via a custom platform powered by large language models.

Gianmarco Biancalani, University of Haifa

The Life Stories of Older Gay Men in Italy and Their Response to a Tele-Drama-Based Intervention: A Qualitative Study

This qualitative research project explores the life stories of older gay men in Italy and examine their response to a group tele-drama intervention tailored to their psychosocial needs. Narrative interviews with older gay men and semi-structured interviews with volunteers who work with this population are conducted, triangulating the two datasets. Based on these findings and relevant literature, a group tele-drama intervention is created. The video-recorded sessions are analyzed using the 6-Key model of drama therapy to examine how participants portray their narratives through the drama work. Post-intervention, participants undergo Client Change Interviews to examine their response to the intervention.

Hansika Kapoor, Monk Prayogshala

Can Creating Misinformation Counter its Spread?

A significant chunk of misinformation research has focused on its identification and discernment, but little work has been done on how misinformation is created. According to the self-generation effect, information is better remembered (and consequently understood) when one generates it instead of simply consuming it. Thus, we aim to study the impact of the creation of misinformation on its discernment, weaving together novel areas of dark creativity and misinformation research. In a controlled setting, can generating misinformation serve as a strategy for psychological inoculation?

Clin Lai, The Pennsylvania State University

Creativity Partner: Comparing human and generative AI as collaborator in creative tasks

Creative endeavors thrive on collaboration with others. With the rise in the use of generative AI in creative processes, it remains unknown if ideas generated with AI tend to be more or less creative than ideas generated when working with another human. This study will compare human-human and human-ChatGPT collaborations on the Alternative Uses Task (AUT) and a short story writing task to assess creativity differences. Through this analysis, I aim to identify the strengths and limitations of each partnership, determining when AI is a beneficial collaborative tool and when human interaction remain essential.

Simone Luchini, The Pennsylvania State University

Preserving Human Diversity in the AI Era: How Human-AI Collaboration Impacts Cultural Identity in Literary Creativity

This project will evaluate modern AI assistants’ effectiveness at facilitating short story writing for English Literature students. By collecting a racially diverse sample of experienced writers, we will investigate whether AI tools equally benefit all artists, or whether AI shows evidence of racial bias in creative contexts. Furthermore, we will evaluate the perception of these stories in a diverse audience, testing whether stories written in collaboration with AI are appreciated differently than those written by humans alone.

Stephanie Miller, University of Vienna and Rebekah Rodriguez-Boerwinkle, UNC Greensboro

From the Gallery to the Lab: Phenomenal Art-Experience Across (Digital) Contexts

Recent years have seen a dramatic shift towards digital arts-engagement, but little is known about how these contexts compare to genuine-gallery settings, especially regarding viewers’ felt-experiences. With this project, we aim to assess experience in various settings, first through a direct comparison of the gallery and lab, via a novel measure for capturing emotional-phenomenal experiences of meetings with visual art (Miller et al., in prep). In a second study, we will further these comparisons by considering intermediate, digital contexts, including OGAR, an emerging virtual-gallery tool designed for research use (Rodriguez-Boerwinkle et al., 2023), and immersive virtual reality.

Edward A Vessel, The City College of New York, CUNY

Using personalized deep neural networks to model the effect of category learning on internal representations of art

How do people mentally represent visual art, and how those representations relate to the potential impact of art? A person’s response to artwork is fundamentally personal: how an art object impacts a viewer depends on that person’s detailed, internal model of the visual world, which in turn depends on their personal biography of visual experience. This study combines a category learning task with machine learning to create “personalized” deep neural network models that capture aspects of individual observers’ unique internal representations of visual artworks. These models will then enable measurement of how internal representations of art relate to their impact.

Jennifer Atchinson, Drexel University

A Mixed Methods Experiment Comparing the Impact of Three Conditions of Feedback on Student Creativity: Explaining How Qualitative Beliefs Relate to Quantitative Ratings of Creativity and Physiological Stress

Creative design is an intrinsic component of engineering practice and education, yet the psychological contributions and behavioral manifestations of creativity in engineering populations are understudied. The purpose of this study is to deepen our understanding of how creativity develops and manifests in a population of critical importance: senior engineering students. We will measure creativity using both quantitative and qualitative methods as they engage in a realistic design task where they are explicitly instructed to “be creative.”

Simon Ceh, University of Graz

Ready-at-hand, steadily at hand. The role of digital tools for creative behavior

Creativity, as all other areas of life, is undergoing a digital transformation. This has led to an abundance of digital tools and web-based spheres that in one way or another (claim to) support creativity, but the exact role and effects are still poorly understood. We aim to quantify the significance of creative tools and their impact across the creative process: What features make them handy? When are they used? Which domains are the most digitally-aided? Advancing the understanding of how digital tools are used to facilitate creative behaviors amidst the digital transformation of our world will be of key value to future creativity studies.

Jacopo Frascaroli, University of York

Aesthetic Attitude and Attentional Amplification: An Electrophysiological Study

A centuries-old tradition encompassing philosophy, psychology and artistic practice has described aesthetic experiences as states characterized by heightened attention towards external stimuli. This study aims to give empirical substance to this idea, investigating whether aesthetic experiences might indeed prompt top-down, endogenous attentional enhancements. To do so, we will compare well-established electrophysiological indexes of attentional amplification during the execution of an aesthetic vs a pragmatic evaluation task, using both standard statistical analysis techniques and a machine learning algorithm. The upshot could be a clearer understanding of the “aesthetic attitude,” its neural markers, and its effects on the deployment of attentional resources.

Živa Korda, University of Graz

Investigating Visual Imagery in Creativity Among Professional Artists and Scientists

Visual imagery is an important cognitive ability involved in creative ideation. While different forms of imagination have been implicated to contribute to the creative processes, studies on the relationship between visual imagery and creativity reported domain-, style-, and task-specific effects. The Multifactorial Model of Visual Imagery (MMVI) describes the complex role of visual imagery in creative cognition, however, its theoretical assumptions have not been empirically tested yet. Hence, the aim of this project is to put the assumptions of the MMVI to a test and thereby unravel the role of visual imagery in creative cognition.

Christa Mahlobo, University of Pennsylvania

Black American Flourishing through the Arts & Humanities: Current Strengths and Systemic Barriers to Participation

Black Americans have a rich history of participation in the arts and humanities (A & H). However, little is known about the impact of this participation on flourishing in this group and the mechanisms by which flourishing through the arts is achieved. Additionally, there is increasing concern that barriers to A & H limit access to flourishing benefits from A & H. We will create and administer a national survey to Black Americans across the lifespan to assess these questions which will allow us to better understand how A & H experiences that are culturally salient to Black Americans can contribute to their flourishing.

Kaile Smith, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Developing and Validating a New Scale for Measuring Inspiration

Feeling inspired is a highly adaptive state that artists and scholars have credited with enhancing their ability to transcend previous constraints and pursue new creative possibilities both within one‚Äôs life and art. Thus, there is a need for a more fine-grained psychometric tool for assessing inspiration within the context of creativity and arts research. The proposed study aims to construct a comprehensive and reliable psychometric scale for measuring inspiration. This scale will aid future research in better understanding individuals’ evoked responses to stimulating influences and artworks, awareness of new ideas and possibilities, and motivation to actualize and/or express one’s experiences and ideas.

Eva Specker, University of Vienna

Aesthetic Experience as an Emotion Regulation Mechanism

In this project I aim to investigate if and how aesthetic experiences can function as a emotion regulation mechanism. It has been argued that sensory experience in general can have this function (Rodriguez & Kross, 2023), however, this has never been directly investigated. Therefore, I aim to investigate how daily aesthetic experiences can function (implicitly or explicitly) as an emotion regulation mechanism. To capture these daily experiences, I will use experience sampling (ESM) and build on recent advantages in dynamic network modelling.

Payge Japp

The Relationship Between the Dark Triad Traits, Aggression, and Malevolent Creativity

Malevolent creativity, or creativity that is intended to harm others, oneself, objects, or processes has received increasing attention over the years. Previous research has considered how various variables, such as gender, aggression, and the Dark Triad traits, individually predict malevolent creativity, but research has not examined the interaction of these variables. Therefore, the current proposal examines how the Dark Triad traits predict malevolent creativity and investigates how aggression may interact with this relationship. Additionally, the current proposal also investigates how gender may play a role in this relationship between the Dark Triad traits and malevolent creativity.

Averie E. Linnell

Assessing Malevolent Creativity in the Workplace: A Performance-Based Approach

Malevolent creativity (MC) is defined as the use of creative ideas to intentionally harm others, including material, mental, and physical inflictions (Cropley et al., 2008; Cropley et al., 2014). Over the brief lifespan of MC research, several measurement approaches have been trialed, all with shortcomings. In response to the gap in available materials, the present study aims to develop and test a set of new problem narratives to determine effectiveness in eliciting and observing MC. In particular, there has been a call to expand from the available problem solving scenarios to a workplace specific context (James et al., 1999; Perchtold-Stefan et al., 2021; Harris & Reiter-Palmon, 2015). Accordingly, problem narratives will depict unfair workplace scenarios that participants will be presented with and asked to generate ideas in response to. Further, the relationship between traditional measures of creativity, MC, counterproductive work behaviors, and perceived injustice will be investigated. The goal of this research is to develop an improved instrument to determine antecedents and contextual moderators to MC and ultimately aid prevention in the workplace.

Danielle Warzager

Drama-Therapy for Stress Reduction of Refugee Children in Elementary School: A Mixed Methods Process and Outcome Study

"The purpose of the present study is to examine a drama therapy stress reduction program for refugee children named Miss Kendra. The program works with refugee children in an elementary school in Israel and offers a unique model that promotes students’ academic achievements through toxic stress reduction. The study seeks to explore the link between the program’s principles and mechanism for toxic stress reduction and pedagogical and behavioural outcomes. Additionally, the study will examine the program’s influence emotionally and socially on the individual and class level as factors that may account for the changes in the outcomes."

Kim N. Awa

The Role of Expertise in Cortical Patterns During Different Stages of the Creative Process: An EEG Study

How does expertise in visual art shape a person’s neurocognitive patterns during the creative process and how can research promote ecologically valid procedures to explore these individual differences? Using a mobile EEG, the current study addresses these questions by asking both novices and visual-art experts to engage in ideation and externalization stages of the creative process by generating either creative or conventional drawings. Participants are also provided artistic tools (e.g., pastels) that are commonly found in an artist’s studio, further constructing a procedure and space that reflects real-world creativity.

MacKenzie Trupp

Enhancing the Well-being Impacts of Art Viewing through Aesthetic Looking

Emerging research indicates that art viewing can be beneficial in various settings. However, although there is strong evidence that art can be a useful well-being intervention, most research has focused on documenting or detecting these effects but not on how these might occur or be mediated. In this project, we examine this topic by designing and testing a video instruction manipulation installed at the gallery entrance to enhance aesthetic experience based on ‘twofoldness’ and ‘slow-looking’ concepts. The aesthetic-looking manipulation will be compared to a typical gallery visit with a randomized control design and assessed via physiological and self-report measures.

Ryan Joseph Slaby

The Posterior Cerebellum’s Causal Role in the Appreciation and Affectual Evaluation of Visual Art.

Research utilizing non-invasive brain stimulation has shown that the posterior cerebellum plays a causal role in the processing and recognition of human emotions, and although limited, neuroimaging evidence suggests that the posterior cerebellum may be involved in the appreciation of visual art. This project aims to illuminate the posterior cerebellum’s function in the visual aesthetic experience by utilizing cerebellar transcranial direct current stimulation to explore its causal role in the appreciation and affective evaluation of figural paintings. Project findings will advance knowledge concerning the posterior cerebellum and the visual aesthetic experience within the more general population.

Christian Rominger

How many roads must people walk down before they solve a creativity task? A bottom-up approach to investigate the dose-response relationship between physical activity and creative ideation performance in the field

Research indicated that physical activity could enhance creative ideation performance. However, the dose-response relationship of this effect is unknown. Therefore, this project targets to identify the intensity and the duration of physical activity that is necessary to increase creative ideation performance. In order to reach this, we plan to apply a physiological ambulatory assessment protocol to measure physical activity and creative ideation performance during people’s everyday life. We will make use of data-driven bottom-up approaches to finally come up with prediction models of creative ideation performance by means of physical activity, both assessed in everyday life.

Megan G. Stutesman

Children Dancing for Social Cognitive Skills: A Mixed Methods Study

Effects of childhood arts participation on social, emotional, and cognitive development has long been of interest to psychological scientists and the lay public. Connections between dance participation and social cognition, however, has received much less attention than other art forms. Dance overtly uses the body in emotionally and cognitively expressive ways and may therefore be connected to social cognitive skills. In this mixed methods study, we will quantitatively examine connections between childhood dance and a fundamental social cognitive skill, theory of mind, and qualitatively explicate processes within dance that support social cognitive development. Results could spur dance-based interventions and future research on dance and other psychological constructs.

Mindfulness in the Gallery

Rebecca Chamberlain, Goldsmiths, University of London

Virtual Art Visits: Examining the Well-Being Impacts of Immersion

Katherine Cotter, Positive Psychology Center, University of Pennsylvania

Aesthetic experience of street art: Cross-cultural studies in Poland and Hong Kong

Robbie Ho, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Crafting Life Stories in Photocollage: An Online Creative Art-based Intervention for Older Adults

Shoshi Kesiari, University of Padova

Project REAL (Role of Emotions in Actors’ Living) Performance

Vida Manalang, Drexel University

First Year Students’ Creative Problem Solving

Chelsea Miller, University of Northern Colorado

Does Everyday Creativity Predict Academic Success? A Study with Student Veterans

Emily Romero, University of Northern Colorado

The role of creative identity in the association between gender-biased beliefs about creativity and creative outcomes

Christa Taylor, Université Catholique de Louvain

Detailed summaries for the 2021 funded projects: 2021 Micro-grant Abstracts (PDF)