Paul Silvia

Research interests:Emotion--Motivation/Goal Setting--Research Methods/Assessment--Self/Identity--Social Cognition--Creativity--Psychophysiology

There are 194 included publications by Paul Silvia :

TitleDateViewsBrief Description
Aberrant Asociality: How Individual Differences in Social Anhedonia Illuminate the Need to Belong 2011 6868 The need to belong, a fundamental concept in psychology, organizes a wide range of findings in the study of interpersonal relationships. We suggest that human belongingness needs can be illuminated by examining when they go awry. We review research o...
ADHD and nonsuicidal self-injury in male veterans with and without PTSD 2017 163 The objective of the present research was to examine the association between ADHD symptoms and nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) in male Iraq/Afghanistan-era veterans with and without PTSD. Approximately 25% of veterans screened positive for clinically-...
Affective Temperaments: Unique Constructs or Dimensions of Normal Personality by Another Name? 2013 3072 Background: Current models theorize that affective temperaments underlie the development and expression of mood psychopathology. Recent studies support the construct validity of affective temperaments in clinical and non-clinical samples. However, o...
Age-related differences in mind-wandering in daily life 2018 2871 In recent years, several laboratory studies have indicated that healthy older adults exhibit a reduction in mind-wandering frequency compared with young adults. However, it is unclear if these findings extend to daily life settings. In the current st...
The ancestral angle on aesthetics, creativity, and the arts. [Review of the book Evolutionary and neurocognitive approaches to aesthetics, creativity, and the arts.] 2007 1554 Anyone who works in a big department—or who enjoys stereotyping—can discern the stereotypical personalities associated with psychology’s subfields. Which member of the department owns a leather briefcase and a pen that requires refills? In a departme...
Anger, disgust, and the negative aesthetic emotions: Expanding an appraisal model of aesthetic experience. 2007 7380 Among Andres Serrano's many controversial photographs—images of corpses in a morgue, portraits of Ku Klux Klan members, images of blood and semen pressed between glass—Piss Christ stands out. Before a 1997 exhibition at the National Gallery of Victor...
Another look at creativity and intelligence: Exploring higher-order models and probable confounds. 2008 12157 How strongly is creativity related to intelligence? Although a large body of work has found a small relationship between them, there are reasons to suspect that their relationship has been underestimated. Most studies have assessed creativity and int...
Appetitive motivation in depressive anhedonia: Effects of piece-rate cash rewards on cardiac and behavioral outcomes 2019 1004 Deficits in self-regulation and motivation are central to depression. Using motivational intensity theory (Brehm & Self, 1989), the present research examined how depressive anhedonia influences effort during a piece-rate appetitive task. In piece-rat...
Applying many-facet Rasch modeling in the assessment of creativity 2019 1292 Creativity assessment with open-ended production tasks relies heavily on scoring the quality of a subject’s ideas. This creates a faceted measurement structure involving persons, tasks (and ideas within tasks), and raters. Most studies, however, do n...
Appraisal components and emotion traits: Examining the appraisal basis of trait curiosity. 2008 9250 Individual differences related to emotions are typically represented as emotion traits. Although important, these descriptive models often do not address the psychological dynamics that underlie the trait. Appraisal theories of emotion assume that in...
Are intelligence and creativity really so different? Fluid intelligence, executive processes, and strategy use in divergent thinking. 2011 15517 Contemporary creativity research views intelligence and creativity as essentially unrelated abilities, and many studies have found only modest correlations between them. The present research, based on improved approaches to creativity assessment and ...
Are openness and intellect distinct aspects of openness to experience? A test of the O/I model. 2011 6464 The Openness/Intellect (O/I) model proposes that Openness to Experience has two major facets—Openness and Intellect—that can be measured with the Big Five Aspect Scales (BFAS). Thus far, however, research has not shown distinct, unique relationships ...
Are rumination and reflection types of self-focused attention? 2005 8248 The study of self-focused attention explores both state self-focus (objective self-awareness) and individual-differences in trait self-focus (self-consciousness). Trapnell and Campbell (1999) proposed a motivational model of individual-differences in...
Are the sources of interest the same for everyone? Using multilevel mixture models to explore individual differences in appraisal structures. 2009 2917 How does personality influence the relationship between appraisals and emotions? Recent research suggests individual differences in appraisal structures: people may differ in an emotion's appraisal pattern. We explored individual differences in inter...
Assessing creativity with divergent thinking tasks: Exploring the reliability and validity of new subjective scoring methods. 2008 29252 Divergent thinking is central to the study of individual differences in creativity, but the traditional scoring systems (assigning points for infrequent responses and summing the points) face well-known problems. After critically reviewing past scori...
Assessing creativity with self-report scales: A review and empirical evaluation. 2012 33262 This article reviews recent developments in the assessment of creativity using self-report scales. We focus on four new and promising scales: the Creative Achievement Questionnaire, the Biographical Inventory of Creative Behaviors, the revised Creati...
Assessment of real-life creativity: The Inventory of Creative Activities and Achievements (ICAA) 2018 5894 This article introduces the Inventory of Creative Activities and Achievements (ICAA), a broad-based assessment of individual differences in real-life creativity. The ICAA provides independent scales for the frequency of engagement in everyday creativ...
Assessment of Score Dependability of the Wisconsin Schizotypy Scales Using Generalizability Analysis 2010 2131 To investigate the reliability of the Wisconsin Schizotypy Scales, this study applied generalizability analysis with two college student samples who completed the scales at two time points. The results indicated that the Revised Social Anhedonia Scal...
Attachment style predicts affect, cognitive appraisals, and social functioning in daily life 2015 1401 The way in which attachment styles are expressed in the moment as individuals navigate their real-life settings has remained an area largely untapped by attachment research. The present study examined how adult attachment styles are expressed in dail...
Balance theory, unit relations, and attribution: The underlying integrity of Heiderian theory. 2007 10154 Fritz Heider's (1958c) book The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations and the handful of articles preceding it (e.g., Heider, 1944, Heider, 1946; Heider & Simmel, 1944) provide the cornerstone—and a major part of the foundation—of research and theory...
Being with others and feeling happy: Emotional expressivity in everyday life 2012 7739 An experience sampling study assessed the relation between psychological functioning in daily life and emotional expressivity as measured by the emotional expressivity scale (EES). Four hundred and twenty-nine participants carried personal digital as...
Biased recognition of happy facial expressions in social anxiety. 2006 8566 Recognizing emotional expressions is central to understanding the feelings and intentions of other people. Little is known about how social anxiety affects the recognition of emotional expressions. Recent research finds a recognition advantage for ha...
Brain networks of the imaginative mind: Dynamic functional connectivity of default and cognitive control networks relates to openness to experience 2018 283 Imagination and creative cognition are often associated with the brain's default network (DN). Recent evidence has also linked cognitive control systems to performance on tasks involving imagination and creativity, with a growing number of studies re...
Brief assessment of schizotypy: Developing short forms of the Wisconsin Schizotypy Scales 2011 3290 The Wisconsin Schizotypy Scales—the Perceptual Aberration, Magical Ideation, Physical Anhedonia, and Revised Social Anhedonia Scales—have been used extensively since their development in the 1970s and 1980s. Based on psychometric analyses using item ...
Cantankerous creativity: Honesty-humility, agreeableness, and the HEXACO structure of creativity. 2011 4233 Creativity research has suggested that creative people are low in agreeableness. To explore this issue, we applied the HEXACO model of personality structure, which offers an expanded representation of interpersonal traits, particularly a distinction ...
Categorizing at the group-level in response to intragroup social comparisons: A self-categorization theory integration of self-evaluation and social identity motives. 2006 2197 Two experiments examined how people respond to upward social comparisons in terms of the extent to which they categorize the self and the source of comparison within the same social group. Self-evaluation maintenance theory (SEM) suggests that upward...
Changing attitudes toward prison reform: Effects of similarity to prisoners on attraction and rejection. 2005 6860 Human-rights organizations and prisoner advocacy groups try to create positive attitudes toward liberal prison reform by emphasizing similarities between the public and prisoners. Theories of similarity and attraction, however, suggest that this stra...
Clever people: Intelligence and humor production ability 2018 2352 Are smarter people funnier? Recent work suggests that cognitive abilities are important to humor production—the ability to generate funny ideas on the spot. Using the Cattell–Horn–Carroll model of intelligence, the present research examined both gene...
Comparing the factor structure of the Wisconsin Schizotypy Scales and the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire 2014 2350 Schizotypy is a multidimensional construct that captures the expression of schizophrenic symptoms and impairment from subclinical levels to full-blown psychosis. The present study examined the comparability of the factor structure of 2 leading psycho...
Confusion and interest: The role of knowledge emotions in aesthetic experience. 2010 11284 What makes something confusing? Confusion is a common response to challenging, abstract, and complex works, but it has received little attention in psychology. Based on appraisal theories of emotion, I suggest that confusion and interest have differe...
Conscientiousness and effort-related cardiac activity in response to piece-rate cash incentives 2018 750 Although conscientiousness predicts many aspects of motivation, from delay of gratification to higher achievement, its relationship to responses to monetary incentives is surprisingly inconsistent. Several studies have found null or negative relation...
Contrasting regulatory focus and reinforcement sensitivity: A daily diary study of goal pursuit and emotion. 2012 2412 This study examined the moderating effects of motivational orientation on daily affect and goal pursuit. Based on recent revisions to Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory, measures of BIS (BIS-r and Fight–Flight–Freeze System or FFFS), BAS, and regulator...
Can positive affect induce self-focused attention? Methodological and measurement issues. 2006 3857 Some studies find that positive affect can induce self-focused attention, but other studies find no effect. We suggest that the contrary findings result from how self- awareness was measured. One group of participants listened to happy or neutral mus...
Creative aging: functional brain networks associated with divergent thinking in older and younger adults 2019 279 Creative thinking is associated with connectivity between the default and executive control networks in the young brain. In aging, this pattern of functional coupling has been observed across multiple tasks. We have described this as the Default-Exec...
Creative fixation is no laughing matter: The effects of funny and unfunny examples on humor production 2018 1118 How do people come up with humorous ideas? In creative cognition research, exposure to good examples sometimes causes fixation (people get “stuck” on the examples) but other times sparks inspiration (people's responses are more creative). The present...
The Creative Mind in Daily Life: How Cognitive and Affective Experiences Relate to Creative Thinking and Behavior 2022 385 Creativity has long been conceptually linked to experiences of emotion and mind wandering, yet these empirical relationships remain unclear, and few studies have explored the thoughts and emotions of creative people in daily life. To investigate how ...
Creative motivation: Creative achievement predicts cardiac autonomic markers of effort during divergent thinking 2014 2693 Executive approaches to creativity emphasize that generating creative ideas can be hard and requires mental effort. Few studies, however, have examined effort-related physiological activity during creativity tasks. Using motivational intensity theory...
Creativity and the default network: A functional connectivity analysis of the creative brain at rest 2014 3127 The present research used resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine whether the ability to generate creative ideas corresponds to differences in the intrinsic organization of functional networks in the brain. We examined t...
Creativity and intelligence revisited: A reanalysis of Wallach and Kogan (1965). 2008 17155 Many decades of research have shown that creativity and intelligence are modestly related. Some studies, however, have found that creativity and intelligence are essentially unrelated. The best example may be Wallach and Kogan's (1965) landmark study...
Creativity, ordinary thinking, and the cultures of creativity research. [Review of the book Creativity: Understanding innovation in problem solving, science, invention, and the arts.] 2007 5831 Among science’s many joys is the devilish joy of contrarianism. It’s a special treat to read a book that goes against conventional wisdom and that reinterprets past work in light of a new theory. Robert Weisberg’s hefty, heterodox Creativity is a maj...
Curiosity 2017 925 Concepts related to interest, curiosity, and learning motivation appear in a wide swath of scholarship. This chapter develops a perspective on curiosity that is grounded in modern models of motivation and emotion. A functional approach seeks to under...
The Curiosity and Exploration Inventory-II: Development, factor structure, and psychometrics. 2009 4606 Given curiosity’s fundamental role in motivation, learning, and well-being, we sought to refine the measurement of trait curiosity with an improved version of the Curiosity and Exploration Inventory (CEI; [Kashdan, T. B., Rose, P., & Fincham, F. D. (...
Curiosity protects against interpersonal aggression: Cross-sectional, daily process, and behavioral evidence. 2013 1949 Objective Curiosity is the propensity to recognize and seek out new information and experience, including an intrinsic interest in learning and developing one's knowledge. With few exceptions, researchers have often ignored the social consequences o...
Default and Executive Network Coupling Supports Creative Idea Production 2015 2055 2014-2015 Open Access Publishing Fund Grant Winner---The role of attention in creative cognition remains controversial. Neuroimaging studies have reported activation of brain regions linked to both cognitive control and spontaneous imaginative proces...
Deflecting reactance: The role of similarity in increasing compliance and reducing resistance. 2005 8591 On the basis of the approach–avoid dynamics assumed by reactance theory (S. S. Brehm & J. W. Brehm, 1981) and other models (E. S. Knowles & J. A. Linn, 2004), it was predicted that interpersonal similarity can reduce reactance by increasing complianc...
Depressive Anhedonia and Creative Self-concepts, Behaviors, and Achievements 2020 384 In the large literature on creativity and mental illness, relatively few studies have explored anhedonia—impairments in anticipating, seeking, and experiencing rewards. This project explored self-reported creativity in a sample of adults who differed...
Development and psychometric properties of the Multidimensional Schizotypy Scale: A new measure for assessing positive, negative, and disorganized schizotypy 2018 884 This article reports on the development of a new self-report questionnaire measure of schizotypy – the Multidimensional Schizotypy Scale (MSS). Schizotypy offers a useful and unifying construct for understanding schizophrenia-spectrum psychopathology...
A dimensional analysis of creativity and mental illness: Do anxiety and depression symptoms predict creative cognition, creative accomplishments, and creative self-concepts? 2010 19719 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 cre...
The dimensional structure of short forms of the Wisconsin Schizotypy Scales 2015 2328 The Wisconsin Schizotypy Scales (WSS) are widely used for assessing schizotypy. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) indicates that a two-factor structure, positive and negative schizotypy, underlies these scales. Recently developed 15-item short forms...
The dimensional structure of the Wisconsin schizotypy scales: Factor identification and construct validity. 2008 2668 The present study examined the factor structure underlying the Wisconsin Schizotypy Scales and the validity of these dimensions. Confirmatory factor analysis with 6137 nonclinical young adults supported a 2-factor model with positive and negative sch...
Discernment and creativity: How well can people identify their most creative ideas? 2008 3702 Some ideas should never see the light of day. It shouldn't surprise us that someone thought of selling artificial testicles for neutered dogs, measuring the emotions of vegetables, or drinking urine to treat cancer: we all have some misses along with...
Disentangling the cycle: Potential mediators and moderators in the intergenerational transmission of parent-child aggression 2018 363 Although a cycle of harsh and abusive parenting has been recognized for decades, this cycle is not inevitable. Indeed, the mechanisms underlying such patterns, and the resources parents may access to disrupt this cycle, require further study. Researc...
The disguise of sobriety: Unveiled by alcohol in persons with an aggressive personality. 2012 1628 This investigation examined the factor structure of 8 well-validated self-report measures that assess traits that fall under the rubric of an “aggressive personality” and then determined how those factor(s) moderated the association between alcohol i...
Do depressive symptoms "blunt" effort? an analysis of cardiac engagement and withdrawal for an increasingly difficult task 2016 917 Research on depression and effort has suggested “depressive blunting”—lower cardiovascular reactivity in response to challenges and stressors. Many studies, however, find null effects or higher reactivity. The present research draws upon motivational...
Do People Have a Thing for Bling? Examining Aesthetic Preferences for Shiny Objects 2018 2992 Researchers in the evolutionary aesthetics tradition have suggested that people prefer shiny objects because glossiness connotes water. We consider some methodological issues in past research and present an experiment that manipulated the glossiness ...
Ecological assessment in research on aesthetics, creativity, and the arts: Basic concepts, common questions, and gentle warnings 2019 1369 Aesthetics, creativity, and arts researchers employ a variety of methods to answer their research questions. Ecological methods—assessing people in their everyday environments—are becoming more common, but researchers curious to try conducting a dail...
The effects of psychotherapy for major depressive disorder on daily mood and functioning: A longitudinal experience sampling study 2017 938 Experience sampling methodology (ESM) was used in a randomized controlled trial of short-term therapy to examine changes in daily affect and reactivity to daily event appraisals among depressed patients. Fifty-five depressed adults (mean age 37 years...
Effort deficits and depression: The influence of anhedonic depressive symptoms on cardiac autonomic activity during a mental challenge 2014 1778 Motivational approaches to depression emphasize the role of dysfunctional motivational dynamics, particularly diminished reward and incentive processes associated with anhedonia. A study examined how anhedonic depressive symptoms, measured continuous...
Emotion concepts and self- focused attention: Exploring parallel effects of emotional states and emotional knowledge. 2006 3951 Many experiments have found that emotional experience affects self-focused attention. Several approaches to cognition and emotion predict that conscious emotional experience may be unnecessary for this effect. To test this hypothesis, two experiments...
Emotional responses to art: From collation and arousal to cognition and emotion. 2005 26535 Emotions and art are intimately related (Tan, 2000). From ancient to modern times, theories of aesthetics have emphasized the role of art in evoking, shaping, and modifying human feelings. The experimental study of preferences, evaluations, and feeli...
Evaluating the Distorting Effects of Inattentive Responding and Social Desirability on Self-Report Scales in Creativity and the Arts 2017 1323 Inattentiveness and social desirability might be particularly problematic for self-report scales in creativity and arts research. Respondents who are inattentive or who present themselves favorably will score highly on scales that yield positively sk...
Evaluating the RZ Interval and the Pre-ejection Period as Impedance Cardiography Measures of Effort-Related Cardiac Sympathetic Activity 2018 528 Research on effort and motivation commonly measures how the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system affects the cardiovascular system. The cardiac pre-ejection period (PEP), assessed via impedance cardiography, is a widely-used sympathetic...
Evaluating self-reflection and insight as self-conscious traits. 2011 13825 Recent years have seen several new models of individual-differences in self-consciousness. The present research evaluated self-reflection and insight as types of self-focused attention. In the self-reflection and insight model, both traits represent ...
Everyday creative activity as a path to flourishing 2018 4465 Recent experience sampling and diary studies have shown that spending time on creative goals during a day is associated with higher activated positive affect (PA) on that day. Based on models of creativity as a tool for promoting well-being, the pres...
Everyday Creativity in Daily Life: An Experience-sampling Study of “little c” Creativity 2014 12340 Richards proposed that everyday creativity—creative actions that are common among ordinary people in daily life, such as drawing, making recipes, writing, and any activity done with the purpose of being creative—both fosters and reflects psychologica...
An examination of the broader effects of warzone experiences on returning Iraq/Afghanistan veterans? psychiatric health 2015 1495 The objective of the present research was to test the hypotheses that: (1) Iraq/Afghanistan war veterans experience a wide range of psychiatric symptomatology (e.g., obsessive–compulsive symptoms, hypochondriasis, somatization); and (2) general psych...
An Experience-Sampling Study of Depressive Symptoms and Their Social Context 2011 3397 Both clinical and subclinical depression are associated with social impairment; however, few studies have examined the impact of social contact in the daily lives of people with depressive symptoms. The current study used the experience-sampling meth...
An exploratory analysis of individual differences in mind wandering content and consistency 2020 1154 We conducted an exploratory study of adult individual differences in the contents of mind-wandering experiences and in the moment-to-moment consistency of that off-task thought content within tasks. This secondary analysis of a published dataset (Kan...
Exploratory Graph Analysis of the Multidimensional Schizotypy Scale 2019 855 The present study examined the dimensional structure underlying the Multidimensional Schizotypy Scale (MSS) and its brief version (MSS-B). We used Exploratory Graph Analysis (EGA) to evaluate their dimensional structure in two large, independent samp...
Exploring alternative deterrents to emotional intensity: Anticipated happiness, distraction, and sadness. 2001 4042 A recent theory of emotional intensity (Brehm, 1999) argues that emotions are functionally identical to motivational states. Like motivational states, the intensity of an emotion should be a joint function of the importance of instigating events and ...
Expressed and measured vocational interests: Distinctions and definitions. 2001 6581 A conceptual look at the distinction between expressed and measured interests is undertaken. Instead of denoting two different aspects of "vocational interests," expressed and measured interests refer to distinct psychological constructs. Expressed i...
The Expression of Adult ADHD Symptoms in Daily Life: An Application of Experience Sampling Methodology 2008 3804 Objective: To use experience sampling method (ESM) to examine the impact of inattentive and hyperactive-impulsive ADHD symptoms on emotional well-being, activities and distress, cognitive impairment, and social functioning assessed in the daily lives...
The expression of bipolar spectrum psychopathology in daily life 2011 2163 Background Bipolar psychopathology has traditionally been defined by categorical diagnoses. However, these disorders may simply reflect the extremes of a broader spectrum of clinical and subclinical bipolar psychopathology. Method The present stud...
The expression of positive and negative schizotypy in daily life: an experience sampling study. 2012 5825 Background. Psychometrically identified positive schizotypy and negative schizotypy are differentially related to psychopathology, personality and social functioning. However, little is known about the experience and expression of schizotypy in daily...
Factor Invariance of Psychometric Schizotypy in Spanish and American Sample 2011 1117 The present study extended recent work examining the factor structure underlying the Wisconsin Schizotypy Scales by examining the factor invariance of this structure in Spanish and American nonclinical samples of young adults. A series of confirmator...
Feeling Like Crying When Listening to Music: Exploring Musical and Contextual Features 2019 1650 Feeling like crying is a common response to music. Recent work suggests two forms of aesthetic crying: an awe-inspired, positive kind and a distressed, sad kind. Besides their emotional tone, what differentiates these experiences? The present researc...
A First Look at the Role of Domain-General Cognitive and Creative Abilities in Jazz Improvisation 2013 3856 The present study explored the associations among several cognitive and creative abilities and expert ratings of jazz improvisational quality. Ten male undergraduate jazz students (8 performance majors, 2 education majors; 5 winds, 3 strings, 1 piano...
Flexible effects of positive mood on self-focused attention. 2005 2949 How moods influence self-focused attention is controversial. One model (Sedikides &Green, 2000) predicts that different moods have different effects on self-focus; another model (Salovey, 1992) predicts that all moods increase self-focus. Both models...
For Whom the Mind Wanders, and When, Varies Across Laboratory and Daily-Life Settings 2017 2476 Undergraduates (N = 274) participated in a weeklong daily-life experience-sampling study of mind wandering after being assessed in the lab for executive-control abilities (working memory capacity; attention-restraint ability; attention-constraint abi...
For Whom the Mind Wanders, and When: An Experience- Sampling Study of Working Memory and Executive Control in Daily Life 2007 6494 An experience-sampling study of 124 under-graduates, pretested on complex memory-span tasks, examined the relation between working memory capacity (WMC) and the experience of mind wandering in daily life. Over 7 days, personal digital assistants sign...
Funny selves: Development of the Humor Efficacy and Identity Short Scales (HEISS) 2021 378 Although humor is a universal feature of human communication, people vary widely in how they create and use humor. Guided by a broader model of creative self-beliefs, we developed the Humor Efficacy and Identity Short Scales (HEISS), a pair of 4-item...
A “Goldilocks zone” for mind-wandering reports? A secondary data analysis of how few thought probes are enough for reliable and valid measurement 2022 108 Mind-wandering assessment relies heavily on the thought probe technique as a reliable and valid method to assess momentary task-unrelated thought (TUT), but there is little guidance available to help researchers decide how many probes to include with...
The grim world of grant writing. [Review of the book Writing the NIH grant proposal: A step-by-step guide.] 2006 1527 Many senior faculty are perplexed by the mentoring expected by junior faculty. In “the old days,” I have heard, professors were simply hired and expected to get to it—no new-faculty brunches, professional skills workshops, or mollycoddling mentors. M...
Gritty People Try Harder: Grit and Effort-related Cardiac Autonomic Activity during an Active Coping Challenge 2013 3055 Grit, a recently proposed personality trait associated with persistence for long-range goals, predicts achievement in a wide range of important life outcomes. Using motivational intensity theory, the present research examined the physiological underp...
How does music training predict cognitive abilities? A bifactor approach to musical expertise and intelligence 2016 1541 Many studies have found that variation in music training is associated with intellectual abilities, but research disagrees over whether music education should primarily correlate with general intelligence (g) or with specific lower-level cognitive ab...
If you’re funny and you know it: Personality, gender, and people’s ratings of their attempts at humor 2021 426 In seven studies (n = 1133), adults tried to create funny ideas and then rated the funniness of their responses, which were also independently rated by judges. In contrast to the common “funnier than average” effect found for global self-ratings, peo...
Individual differences in conflicting stimulus evaluations: Openness/Intellect predicts mixed-valenced appraisals of visual art 2018 458 Openness/Intellect, a trait domain reflecting a tendency towards cognitive exploration, is positively associated with the tendency to experience mixed emotions (i.e., simultaneous positive and negative feelings). This study examined whether this trai...
Individual Differences in the Executive Control of Attention, Memory, and Thought, and Their Associations with Schizotypy 2016 1679 Reports an error in "Individual differences in the executive control of attention, memory, and thought, and their associations with schizotypy" by Michael J. Kane, Matt E. Meier, Bridget A. Smeekens, Georgina M. Gross, Charlotte A. Chun, Paul J. Silv...
Individual differences in self-discrepancies and emotional experience: Do distinct discrepancies predict distinct emotions? 2010 7373 Self-Discrepancy Theory (SDT) proposes that ideal-self discrepancies predict dejection/depression and ought-self discrepancies predict agitation/anxiety, but individual differences research has rarely found clear support for this pattern. After consi...
Individual differences in task-unrelated thought in university classrooms 2021 391 This study investigated what academic traits, attitudes, and habits predict individual differences in task-unrelated thought (TUT)during lectures, and whether this TUT propensity mediates associations between academic individual differences and cours...
Interest and interests: The psychology of constructive capriciousness. 2001 19241 The abiding interest that sustains scientific research has only rarely been displaced onto interest itself. What little research there is, however, has pursued one of two parallel paths. The first path is the study of interest as a transient affectiv...
Interesting things and curious people: Exploration and engagement as transient states and enduring strengths. 2009 3762 Curiosity, interest, and intrinsic motivation are critical to the development of competence, knowledge, and expertise. Without a mechanism of intrinsic motivation, people would rarely explore new things, learn for its own sake, or engage with uncerta...
The intersection of self-evaluation maintenance and social identity theories: Intragroup judgment in interpersonal and intergroup contexts. 2000 8749 In two studies, the authors explore the integration of the self-evaluation maintenance (SEM) model and social identity theory (SIT) by focusing on each perspective’s predictions for the evaluation of members of one’s ingroup. SEM’s predictions apply ...
Is creativity domain-specific? Latent class models of creative accomplishments and creative self-descriptions. 2008 6883 Is creativity domain-specific? We describe the value of latent class analysis for appraising domain generality, and we report two studies that explore the latent class structure of creative accomplishments (using Carson, Peterson, and Higgins’s Creat...
Keeping Creativity under Control: Contributions of Attention Control and Fluid Intelligence to Divergent Thinking 2022 286 Increasing research efforts are focused on explaining the cognitive bases of creativity. However, it remains unclear when and how cognitive factors such as intelligence and executive function uniquely contribute to performance on creative thinking ta...
Knowledge-based assessment of expertise in the arts: Exploring aesthetic fluency 2007 2872 In the article, the words aesthetic and aesthetics erroneously appear with a capital A throughout the text. These errors were introduced after the page proofs had been returned, and did not appear in the original manuscript or proofs. Readers should ...
The latent structure of trait curiosity: Evidence for interest and deprivation curiosity dimensions. 2006 6892 To evaluate Litman and Jimerson’s (2004) Interest/Deprivation (IlD) model of curiosity, 355 students (269 women, 86 men) responded to 6 trait curiosity measures including the Curiosityl Interest in the World scale (ClIW; Peterson & Seligman, 2004), t...
Listening Between the Notes: Aesthetic Chills in Everyday Music Listening 2013 2146 Who gets chills—a pleasurable feeling of goose bumps—in response to music, and why? The current study used experience sampling to examine within-person variability in aesthetic chills. For one week, 106 undergraduate participants responded to 10 dail...
Looking past pleasure: Anger, confusion, disgust, pride, surprise, and other unusual aesthetic emotions. 2009 11553 Psychological aesthetics, for the most part, is concerned with people's feelings of pleasure in response to art. The study of mild positive feelings will always be important to psychological aesthetics, but the range of aesthetic feelings is much wid...
Making creative metaphors: The importance of fluid intelligence for creative thought. 2012 4151 The relationship between intelligence and creativity remains controversial. The present research explored this issue by studying the role of fluid intelligence (Gf) in the generation of creative metaphors. Participants (n = 132 young adults) complete...
Masked first name priming increases effort-related cardiovascular reactivity. 2011 1884 Recent research on motivational intensity has shown that explicit manipulations of self-focused attention (e.g., mirrors and video cameras) increase effort-related cardiovascular responses during active coping. An experiment examined whether masked f...
Measurement invariance of the Interpersonal Needs Questionnaire (INQ-15) across sexual orientation, gender identity, and race/ethnicity in a sample of sexual minority young adults 2022 331 Sexual minority (e.g., gay, lesbian, bisexual) people are at increased risk for suicidal thoughts and behaviors compared to their heterosexual peers. The interpersonal theory of suicide proposes that perceived burdensomeness and thwarted belongingnes...
Measuring everyday creativity: A Rasch model analysis of the Biographical Inventory of Creative Behaviors (BICB) scale 2022 1402 Research on everyday creativity—the “little c” creative activities people do in their everyday lives—commonly uses self-report scales to assess people’s engagement in different activities. The present research presents a detailed psychometric analysi...
Metaphorically speaking: Cognitive abilities and the production of figurative speech. 2013 1719 Figurative language is one of the most common expressions of creative behavior in everyday life. However, the cognitive mechanisms behind figures of speech such as metaphors remain largely unexplained. Recent evidence suggests that fluid and executiv...
Mirrors, masks, and motivation: Implicit and explicit self-focused attention influence effort-related cardiovascular reactivity. 2012 2191 Using motivational intensity theory as a framework, three experiments examined how implicit self-focus (manipulated with masked first-name priming) and explicit self-focus (manipulated with a large mirror) influence effort-related cardiovascular acti...
Missed Beeps and Missing Data Dispositional and Situational Predictors of Nonresponse in Experience Sampling Research 2013 1488 Experience sampling research measures people’s thoughts, feelings, and actions in their everyday lives by repeatedly administering brief questionnaires throughout the day. Nonresponse—failing to respond to these daily life questionnaires—has been a v...
Motivational deficits differentially predict improvement in a randomized trial of self-system therapy for depression 2015 2058 Objective: A randomized trial compared the time course and differential predictors of symptom improvement in 2 treatments for depression. Method: Forty-nine adults (84% female) who were not taking antidepressant medications and met diagnostic criteri...
The multidimensional schizotypy scale-brief: Scale development and psychometric properties 2018 1501 This article reports on the development and psychometric properties of a brief version of the Multidimensional Schizotypy Scale (MSS-B). The MSS-B contains 38 items that assess positive, negative, and disorganized schizotypy. The scale was derived fr...
Music to the Inner Ears: Exploring Individual Differences in Musical Imagery 2013 1274 In two studies, we explored the frequency and phenomenology of musical imagery. Study 1 used retrospective reports of musical imagery to assess the contribution of individual differences to imagery characteristics. Study 2 used an experience sampling...
Must interesting things be pleasant? A test of competing appraisal structures. 2006 5827 Appraisal theories have emerged as a powerful perspective on the elicitation and differentiation of emotional experience (Ellsworth & Scherer, 2003). Given the general acceptance of the appraisal approach, a central task for modern appraisal research...
Network structure of the Wisconsin Schizotypy Scales—Short Forms: Examining psychometric filtering approaches 2018 259 Schizotypy is a multidimensional construct that provides a useful framework for understanding the etiology, development, and risk for schizophrenia-spectrum disorders. Past research has applied traditional methods, such as factor analysis, to uncover...
Nothing or the opposite: Intersecting terror management and objective self-awareness. 2001 2001 The human capacity for self-awareness allows people to envision their eventual death and thus creates the potential for debilitating anxiety. Terror management research has shown that self-awareness exacerbates the experience of mortality salience. I...
Noticing the self: Implicit assessment of self-focused attention using word recognition latencies. 2003 6529 Self-focused attention is difficult to measure. Two studies developed an implicit measure of self-focus based on word recognition latencies. Self-focused attention activates self-content, so self-focused people should recognize self-relevant words mo...
Nuanced aesthetic emotions: emotion differentiation is related to knowledge of the arts and curiosity 2017 313 The ability to distinguish between emotions is considered indicative of well-being, but does emotion differentiation (ED) in an aesthetic context also reflect deeper and more knowledgeable aesthetic experiences? Here we examine whether positive and n...
Objective self-awareness theory: Recent progress and enduring problems. 2001 58307 Objective self-awareness theory has undergone fundamental changes in the 3 decades since Duval and Wicklund's (1972) original formulation. We review new evidence that bears on the basic tenets of the theory. Many of the assumptions of self-awareness ...
Old or New? Evaluating the Old/New Scoring Method for Divergent Thinking Tasks 2017 924 When people generate responses during a divergent thinking task, some responses are “old” (retrieved from memory) and some are “new” (generated on the spot). K.J. Gilhooly, E. Fioratou, S.H. Anthony, and V. Wynn (2007) suggested that old and new resp...
On the dependability and feasibility of layperson ratings of divergent thinking 2018 827 A new system for subjective rating of responses to divergent thinking tasks was tested using raters recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk. The rationale for the study was to determine if such raters could provide reliable (aka generalizable) ratings ...
On introspection and self-perception: Does self-focused attention enable accurate self-knowledge? 2001 12071 How is introspection related to accurate self-perception? Self-focused attention is said to facilitate accurate judgments of cognitive aspects (attitudes, standards, and attributions) and somatic aspects (sensations, arousal, physical symptoms, emoti...
On personality and piloerection: Individual differences in aesthetic chills and other unusual aesthetic experiences 2011 2941 Relatively little is known about aesthetic chills, the experience of goose bumps and shivers in response to the arts. The present study explored how often people report such experiences and what people who often experience them are like. After noting...
Openness to experience and auditory discrimination ability in music: An investment approach 2016 1471 Why do people vary in how well they discriminate musical sounds? The present research explored personality traits as predictors of auditory discrimination ability, a cornerstone of many popular musical aptitude tests. According to investment-theory a...
Openness to experience, plasticity, and creativity: Exploring lower-order, higher-order, and interactive effects. 2010 23545 What are creative people like? Openness to experience is important to creativity, but little is known about plasticity, the higher-order factor that subsumes openness. College students (n = 189) completed measures of the Big Five and measures of crea...
Palm or Cell? Comparing Personal Digital Assistants and Cell Phones for Experience Sampling Research 2013 1948 Personal digital assistants (PDA), particularly Palm Pilots, are popular data collection devices in experience sampling research. The declining availability of such devices, however, has prompted researchers to explore alternative technologies for si...
Perfectionism and causal attributions: An experience sampling approach 2020 329 The primary aim of the study was to examine whether dimensions of perfectionism—socially prescribed perfectionism (SPP) and self-oriented perfectionism (SOP)—were related to causal attributions, and to what extent event-specific attributions about so...
Perfectionism and effort-related cardiac activity: Do perfectionists try harder? 2016 689 Do perfectionists try harder? Previous research on perfectionism and effort has used self-report items and task performance as indicators of effort. The current study investigated whether individual differences in perfectionism predicted effort-relat...
Perfectionism: The good, the bad, and the creative. 2012 5729 The influence of adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism on creativity was examined. Initially, six measures of creativity were administered, including creative self-perceptions, behavior, and performance measures. Adaptive perfectionism was weakly po...
Planned Missing-data Designs in Experience-sampling Research: Monte Carlo Simulations of Efficient Designs for Assessing Within-person Constructs 2014 2037 Experience-sampling research involves trade-offs between the number of questions asked per signal, the number of signals per day, and the number of days. By combining planned missing-data designs and multilevel latent variable modeling, we show how t...
Predicting the interpersonal targets of self-serving attributions. 2001 3430 People will, under certain conditions, attribute failure to an external target to avoid an unfavorable self-evaluation. But to what external target do people attribute failure? Based on Fritz Heider’s analysis of similarity and attribution, we predic...
Predicting maternal and parent–child aggression risk: Longitudinal multimethod investigation using social information processing theory 2017 846 Objective: Given the costly outcomes associated with the physical abuse and harsh discipline of children, identifying pathways leading parents to engage in parent–child aggression (PCA) are critical to prevention and intervention efforts. One model t...
Prediction of Psychopathology and Functional Impairment by Positive and Negative Schizotypy in the Chapmans’ Ten-year Longitudinal Study 2013 2387 The present study examined the predictive validity of psychometrically assessed positive and negative schizotypy in the Chapmans’ 10-year longitudinal data set. Schizotypy provides a useful construct for understanding the etiology and development of ...
Predictors of change in mothers’ and fathers’ parent–child aggression risk 2018 91 Parents' cognitive schemas about parenting, personal vulnerabilities, and personal resources may affect their risk of engaging in parent-child aggression (PCA). This longitudinal study examined predictors of change in mothers' and fathers' PCA risk a...
Psychometric properties and validity of short forms of the Wisconsin Schizotypy Scales in two large samples 2012 4108 The Wisconsin Schizotypy Scales (WSS) have been widely used in the study of clinical and non-clinical samples. However, researchers often find the length of the scales prohibitive. The present study examined the reliability and validity of recently d...
Psychometric Properties of the Wisconsin Schizotypy Scales in an Undergraduate Sample: Classical Test Theory, Item Response Theory, and Differential Item Functioning 2011 3639 The Wisconsin Schizotypy Scales are widely used for assessing schizotypy in nonclinical and clinical samples. However, they were developed using classical test theory (CTT) and have not had their psychometric properties examined with more sophisticat...
Psychopathology, everyday behaviors, and autonomic activity in daily life: an ambulatory impedance cardiography study of depression, anxiety, and hypomanic traits 2018 1037 Discrepancies regarding the link between autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity and psychopathology may be due in part to inconsistent measurement of non-psychological factors, including eating, drinking, activity, posture, and interacting with othe...
A randomized controlled trial examining CBT for college students with ADHD 2021 3611 Objective: College students with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are at increased risk for numerous educational and psychosocial difficulties. This study reports findings from a large, multisite randomized controlled trial examining t...
An RCT of a CBT Intervention for Emerging Adults with ADHD Attending College: Functional Outcomes 2021 303 Objective: The current study reports functional outcomes from a multi-site randomized trial of a cognitive-behavioral treatment program for college students diagnosed with ADHD. Methods: A sample of emerging adults (N = 250; ages 18 to 30) currently ...
Reactance and the dynamics of disagreement: Multiple paths from threatened freedom to resistance to persuasion. 2006 4117 Many experiments show that threats to attitudinal freedom create reactance, but the underlying dynamics of reactance-based disagreement have not received much attention. The present experiments identified two paths from threats to disagreement. In on...
Rejoinder: The madness to our method: Some thoughts on divergent thinking 2008 2736 In this reply, the authors examine the madness to their method in light of the comments. Overall, the authors agree broadly with the comments; many of the issues will be settled only by future research. The authors disagree, though, that past researc...
The relationship of social anxiety and social anhedonia to psychometrically identified schizotypy. 2008 3319 Schizotypy and schizophrenia involve social disinterest (anhedonia) and social anxiety. To clarify the role of social dysfunction in schizotypy, this study examined the relationship of social anxiety and social anhedonia in 364 young adults. As hypot...
Remotely Close Associations: Openness to Experience and Semantic Memory Structure 2018 1120 Openness to experience—the enjoyment of novel experiences and ideas—has many connections to cognitive processes. People high in openness to experience, for example, tend to be more creative and have broader general knowledge than people low in openne...
Reopening openness to experience: A network analysis of four openness to experience inventories 2018 4598 Openness to Experience is a complex trait, the taxonomic structure of which has been widely debated. Previous research has provided greater clarity of its lower order structure by synthesizing facets across several scales related to Openness to Exper...
Reports of therapy skill use and their efficacy in daily life in the short-term treatment of depression 2018 844 Previous studies have shown that the use of therapy skills in between sessions is an important mechanism of symptom improvement. The current study expands this line of research by using a diary approach to examine the use of therapy skills in daily l...
The Resource Replenishment Function of Interest 2011 1793 Interest is a positive emotion associated with increased approach motivation, effort, attention, and persistence. Although experiencing interest promotes behaviors that demand cognitive resources, interest is as a coping resource in frustrating learn...
Responding to deviance: Target exclusion and differential devaluation. 2006 3792 Two studies explored responses to ingroup deviance. Group- defining opinions of prowar Republicans (Study 1) and prolife Christians (Study 2) were challenged by either an ingroup or outgroup deviate. Participants evaluated the deviate and structured ...
Resting respiratory sinus arrhythmia and posttraumatic stress disorder: A meta-analysis 2019 476 Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) has been examined as a psychophysiological marker of stress vulnerability. Research indicates that low resting RSA is associated with physical and mental health problems, including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTS...
Review of the book Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 2007 2788 Reviews the book, Group genius: The creative power of collaboration by K. Sawyer (2007). This book is written for a popular audience. It takes several themes from the author's past work on the sociocultural approach to creativity, particularly his re...
Review of the book New Directions in Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. 2006 1985 Reviews the book, New Directions in Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts edited by Paul Locher, Colin Martindale, and Leonid Dorfman (see record 2006-03935-000). This book's 16 chapters reveal the broad themes of modern research on creativity and the...
Review of the book Undergraduate writing in psychology: Learning to tell the scientific story. 2008 2590 Reviews the book, Undergraduate writing in psychology: Learning to tell the scientific story by R. Eric Landrum (see record 2008-03689-000). This review is written from the perspective of a student who enrolled in a course on academic writing and a p...
Review of the book Write to the Top! How to Become a Prolific Academic. 2008 1592 Reviews the book, Write to the top! How to become a prolific academic by W. Brad Johnson and Carol A. Mullen (2007). This is a worthy addition to the family of books about academic writing. It offers practical and informal advice learned the hard way...
Reward-seeking deficits in major depression: Unpacking appetitive task performance with ex-Gaussian response time variability analysis. 2020 238 Major depressive disorder (MDD) has extensive ties to motivation, including impaired response time (RT) performance. Average RT, however, conflates response speed and variability, so RT differences can be complex. Because recent studies have shown in...
Robust prediction of individual creative ability from brain functional connectivity 2018 1147 People’s ability to think creatively is a primary means of technological and cultural progress, yet the neural architecture of the highly creative brain remains largely undefined. Here, we employed a recently developed method in functional brain imag...
RZ Interval as an Impedance Cardiography Indicator of Effort-Related Cardiac Sympathetic Activity 2020 719 Research on effort and motivation commonly assesses how the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system affects the cardiovascular system. The cardiac pre-ejection period (PEP), assessed via impedance cardiography, is a common outcome, but ass...
Self-awareness and constructive functioning: Revisiting "the human dilemma." 2004 10620 Self-awareness-the capacity to focus attention on oneself, and thus to self-evaluate-has a bad reputation in social-clinical psychology because of its ties to negative affect, depression, suicide, and dysfunction. Using Rollo May's (1967) analysis of...
Self-awareness and the emotional consequences of self-discrepancies. 2005 8246 Several self theories explore the effects of discrepant self-beliefs on motivation and emotion. This research intersected two self theories: self-discrepancy theory and objective self-awareness theory. Self-discrepancy theory predicts that ideal and ...
Self-awareness and emotional intensity. 2002 9903 Does self-awareness amplify or dampen the intensity of emotional experience? Early research argued that self-awareness makes emotional states salient, resulting in greater emotional intensity. But these studies induced a standard for emotional intens...
Self-awareness and the regulation of emotional intensity. 2002 7790 People often regulate their feelings by striving for particular emotional states. The self-regulation of emotions should be influenced by self-awareness, which is a primary instigator of self-regulation. Because the outcome of self-regulation depends...
Self-awareness without awareness? Implicit self-focused attention and behavioral self-regulation. 2013 3635 Objective self-awareness theory contends that focusing attention on the self initiates an automatic comparison of self to standards. To gain evidence for automatic self–standard comparison processes, two experiments manipulated attention to self with...
Self-awareness, probability of improvement, and the self-serving bias. 2005 7780 The self-serving attributional bias—attributing success internally and failure externally—appears for many psychologists to have achieved the status of an empirical fact (Brown & Rogers, 1991). Researchers indeed find a consistent tendency for indivi...
Self-awareness, self-evaluation, and creativity. 2004 9111 The present research examined when self-evaluation influences creativity. Based on objective self-awareness theory, the authors predicted that feeling able to improve would buffer against the detrimental effects of self-evaluation on creativity. Two ...
Self-efficacy and interest: Experimental studies of optimal incompetence. 2003 7270 How does self-efficacy affect interest? The interest-and-interests model assumes that factors that induce interest—novelty, complexity, conflict, and uncertainty—do so non-linearly. Self- efficacy should thus affect interest quadratically, because it...
Self-focus and stereotyping of the self 2010 1572 A study tested the effects of mirror-induced self-focus on participants’ tendency to self-stereotype. Americans high and low in identification with their nationality rated themselves and the group “Americans” on traits that varied in stereotypicality...
Self-focus and task difficulty effects on cardiovascular reactivity. 2008 1781 Two experiments examined the joint impact of self-focused attention and task difficulty on performance-related cardiovascular reactivity. Predictions were derived from an application of the principles of motivational intensity theory and its integrat...
Self-focused attention, performance expectancies, and the intensity of effort: Do people try harder for harder goals? 2010 4206 Many theories argue that goal striving is more intense when people have optimistic expectancies for achieving the goal and when attention is self-focused. Brehm’s motivational intensity theory, however, predicts that the intensity of motivation is on...
A self-novelty manipulation of self-focused attention for Internet and laboratory experiments. 2004 3970 Conventional manipulations of self-focused attention are poorly suited for Internet experiments and for group-based administration. The authors present a self-novelty manipulation that effectively induces self-awareness for such contexts. In the high...
The self-reflection and insight scale: applying item response theory to craft an efficient short form 2021 6134 The human ability for self-consciousness—the capacity to reflect on oneself and to think about one’s thoughts, experiences, and actions—is central to understanding personality and motivation. The present research examined the psychometric properties ...
Self-reflection, insight, and mood disorder symptoms: Evaluating the short form of the self-reflection and insight scale with clinical interviews and self-reports 2022 258 The 20-item Self-reflection and Insight Scale (SRIS) is a widely used measure of individual differences in self-focused attention and private self-consciousness. In the present research, we examined the validity of a 12-item short form of the SRIS, w...
Self-report Measures of Anhedonia and Approach Motivation Weakly Correspond to Anhedonia and Depression Assessed via Clinical Interviews 2021 372 Self-report scales are popular tools for measuring anhedonic experiences and motivational deficits, but how well do they reflect clinically significant anhedonia? Seventy-eight adults participated in face-to-face structured diagnostic interviews: 22 ...
Sex differences in humor production ability: A meta-analysis 2020 870 We offer the first systematic quantitative meta-analysis on sex differences in humor production ability. We included studies where participants created humor output that was assessed for funniness by independent raters. Our meta-analysis includes 36 ...
Shivers and Timbres: Personality and the Experience of Chills From Music 2011 3171 Most people report that listening to music sometimes creates chills—feeling goose bumps and shivers on the neck, scalp, and spine—but some people seem to never experience them. The present research examined who tends to experience music-induced chill...
A skeptical look at dispositional reactance. 2006 4412 Many studies have correlated dispositional reactance scales with other self-report scales, but no experiments have tested whether ?trait reactance? replicates ?state reactance? effects. Using a conventional reactance paradigm, an experiment examined ...
A snapshot of creativity: Evaluating a quick and simple method for assessing divergent thinking. 2009 5939 Creativity assessment commonly uses open-ended divergent thinking tasks. The typical methods for scoring these tasks (uniqueness scoring and subjective ratings) are time-intensive, however, so it is impractical for researchers to include divergent th...
The social world of the socially anhedonic: Exploring the daily ecology of asociality. 2009 3985 The need to belong is fundamental to human motivation. The significance of needs for relatedness and intimacy can be highlighted by examining aberrations in these needs. Social anhedonia, a component of the schizophrenia spectrum, represents a lack o...
Subjective scoring of divergent thinking: Examining the reliability of unusual uses, instances, and consequences tasks. 2011 6861 The present research examined the reliability of three types of divergent thinking tasks (unusual uses, instances, consequences/implications) and two types of subjective scoring (an average across all responses vs. the responses people chose as their...
This is your brain on art. [Review of the book Neuroaesthetics.] 2009 2203 The marvelous human brain excels at finding patterns, at discerning structure, so we feel surprised or confused when our expectations are violated or unmet: Imagine, if you dare, encountering a Starbucks without a laptop-toting freelancer or a suburb...
Throwing away the key: Measuring prison reform attitudes. 2003 4095 The American prison system is larger than ever and ranks among the largest in the world. Yet, prisons have received little research attention relative to other issues in forensic psychology. In an effort to study one facet of the prison system, a sca...
Trait self-focused attention, task difficulty, and effort-related cardiovascular reactivity. 2011 2019 Using motivational intensity theory as a framework, the present experiment examined how individual differences in self-focused attention interact with task difficulty to predict effort, assessed via cardiovascular reactivity. Participants (n = 50) wo...
Tuning the inner radio: The mental control of musical imagery in everyday environments 2019 1303 How easily can people tune their inner radio? Musical imagery—hearing music in your mind—is common but little is known about people’s ability to control their musical imagery in daily life. A recent model distinguishes between initiation (starting mu...
Understanding inner music: A dimensional approach to musical imagery 2018 1489 Musical imagery—hearing music inside your head that isn’t playing in the environment—is a common yet complex experience. To capture the diversity of musical imagery, the present research develops a new conceptual framework consisting of five dimensio...
The undesired self and emotional experience: A latent variable analysis. 2007 10091 Many self-theories presume that discrepancies between the self and goals for the self influence emotional experience. The present research compared how discrepancies from ideal selves, ought selves, and undesired selves predict negative emotions. In ...
Validation of the Multidimensional Schizotypy Scale-Brief in Two Large Samples 2018 384 This study reports on an initial examination of the construct validity of the Multidimensional Schizotypy Scale-Brief (MSS-B) and the first investigation of its psychometric properties outside of its derivation samples. The MSS-B contains 38 items th...
Validity of the multidimensional schizotypy scale: Associations with schizotypal traits and normal personality 2018 1644 The present study provided the first examination of the construct validity of the Multidimensional Schizotypy Scale (MSS) and the first assessment of its psychometric properties outside of its derivation samples. The MSS contains 77 items that assess...
The voluntary control of piloerection 2018 626 Autonomic nervous systems in the human body are named for their operation outside of conscious control. One rare exception is voluntarily generated piloerection (VGP)—the conscious ability to induce goosebumps—whose physiological study, to our knowle...
Wall/object punching: An important but under-recognized form of nonsuicidal self-injury 2018 233 The present research investigated wall/object punching as a form of nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) among 1,143 veterans seeking treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Wall/object punching was remarkably common in this sample (43%), and i...
What does feeling like crying when listening to music feel like? 2018 4495 Music often makes people feel like crying (get a lump in their throat and tears in their eyes) or actually cry. Because crying can co-occur with so many emotions, the present study explored what feeling like crying feels like. A sample of 892 adults ...
What is interesting? Exploring the appraisal structure of interest. 2005 7934 Although the idea that thoughts cause feelings has a long history, systematic research on appraisals and emotions is relatively recent (Schorr, 2001). Modern appraisal theories have made important gains in psychology's understanding of emotion (Ellsw...
What’s Your Major? College Majors as Markers of Creativity 2012 3031 The present research explored the value of students’ college majors as indicators of creativity, particularly creative traits, accomplishments, and interests. Two samples of undergraduate students indicated all of their majors, minors, and degree con...
When Figurative Language Goes off the Rails and under the Bus: Fluid Intelligence, Openness to Experience, and the Production of Poor Metaphors 2021 833 The present research examined the varieties of poor metaphors to gain insight into the cognitive processes involved in generating creative ones. Drawing upon data from two published studies as well as a new sample, adults’ open-ended responses to dif...
When the Need to Belong Goes Wrong: The Expression of Social Anhedonia and Social Anxiety in Daily Life 2007 1758 Baumeister and Leary (1995) proposed that people possess an innate “need to belong” that drives social interactions. Aberrations in the need to belong, such as social anhedonia and anxiety, provide a point of entry for examining this need. The curren...
When the self stands out: Figure-ground effects on self-focused attention. 2004 3010 When do people focus attention on the self? Based on Gestalt notions of figure–ground assignment, two experiments demonstrated that making self figural against a background induces self-focused attention. In Experiment 1, perceiving figural self-symb...
Why are smart people curious? Fluid intelligence, openness to experience, and interest. 2010 5981 The experience of interest is central to intrinsic motivation for learning, so it is important to understand the nature of interest and its sources. Individual differences in fluid intelligence (Gf) predict finding things more interesting, but it is ...
Why do ideas get more creative across time? An executive interpretation of the serial order effect in divergent thinking tasks. 2012 5872 The serial order effect—the tendency for later responses to a divergent thinking task to be better than earlier ones—is one of the oldest and most robust findings in modern creativity work. But why do ideas get better? Using new methods that afford a...
Why don’t we teach graduate students how to write? 2007 3100 Most of us learned academic writing on the street. People learn a lot on the street, but the writing street isn’t the tree-lined boulevard where you learned about smooching or the sandy boardwalk where you learned about what follows smooching. The ...
Working memory capacity and the antisaccade task: A microanalytic–macroanalytic investigation of individual differences in goal activation and maintenance 2018 1334 The association between working memory capacity (WMC) and the antisaccade task, which requires subjects to move their eyes and attention away from a strong visual cue, supports the claim that WMC is partially an attentional construct (Kane, Bleckley,...
Worries about Being Judged versus Being Harmed: Disentangling the Association of Social Anxiety and Paranoia with Schizotypy 2014 2269 Paranoia is a dimension of clinical and subclinical experiences in which others are believed to have harmful intentions. Mild paranoid concerns are relatively common in the general population, and more clinically severe paranoia shares features with ...
The worst performance rule, or the not-best performance rule? Latent-variable analyses of working memory capacity, mind-wandering propensity, and reaction time 2020 717 The worst performance rule (WPR) is a robust empirical finding reflecting that people’s worst task performance shows numerically stronger correlations with cognitive ability than their average or best performance. However, recent meta-analytic work h...