Motivated reasoning occurs when we reason differently about evidence that supports our prior beliefs than when it contradicts those beliefs. Adult participants (N = 377) from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) system completed written responses critically evaluating strengths and weaknesses in a vignette on the topic of anthropogenic climate change (ACC). The vignette had two fictional scientists present prototypical arguments for and against anthropogenic climate change that were constructed with equally flawed and conflicting reasoning. The current study tested and found support (...) for three main hypotheses: cognitive style, personality, and ideology would predict both motivated reasoning and endorsement of human caused climate change; those who accept human-caused climate change will be less likely to engage in biased reasoning and more likely to engage in objective reasoning about climate change than those who deny human activity as a cause of climate change. (144 words). (shrink)

Understanding how impactful scientific articles were funded informs future funding decisions. The structural significance of articles is broken down into two submeasures: citation count and “generativity”. Generativity is an attempt to provide a quantitative operationalization of transformativeness, a concept often used as a funding criterion despite not being a well-defined construct. This report identifies highly impactful and generative publications indexed in the subject area of psychology in the Web of Science in the year 2002. Publications that reported funding sources were (...) found to be more generative than those that did not, and research that was privately funded was found to be more generative than publicly funded research. This analysis is exploratory, and hopefully contributes to a foundation for future empirical investigations into the structure and nature of transformative science that granting agencies would want to fund. (shrink)

Although the influence of affect on creativity has received some theoretical and empirical attention, the role of affect as a consequence of creative problem solving has been neglected. This study is the one of the first to examine empirically the affect that results from creative problem solving. In a 2 (group) × 3 (time period) × 2 (task) factorial design, 122 art and science students were randomly assigned to complete an art or science task and to report on the kind (...) and intensity of affect before, during, and after creative problem solving. It was predicted that art and science students would report different levels of affect only after the insight, not before or during, and that the effects of task, not just group, would contribute to affective variability between art and science students. Science students reported similar levels of (positive) affective intensity before and during creative insight as art students. It was only after the insight that art students reported more intense affective experiences than science students. Task differences accounted for a significant amount of variance in affective intensities, but primarily for art-oriented subjects. These findings suggest that viewing affect as a dependent variable of cognition, rather than primarily as an independent variable, is a direction that would benefit the field of empirical work on cognition and emotion. Current cognitive theories of emotion offer much potential in understanding the affective consequences of creative problem solving. (shrink)

Although the influence of affect on creativity has received some theoretical and empirical attention, the role of affect as a consequence of creative problem solving has been neglected. This study is the one of the first to examine empirically the affect that results from creative problem solving. In a 2 (group) × 3 (time period) × 2 (task) factorial design, 122 art and science students were randomly assigned to complete an art or science task and to report on the kind (...) and intensity of affect before, during, and after creative problem solving. It was predicted that art and science students would report different levels of affect only after the insight, not before or during, and that the effects of task, not just group, would contribute to affective variability between art and science students. Science students reported similar levels of (positive) affective intensity before and during creative insight as art students. It was only after the insight that art students reported more intense affective experiences than science students. Task differences accounted for a significant amount of variance in affective intensities, but primarily for art-oriented subjects. These findings suggest that viewing affect as a dependent variable of cognition, rather than primarily as an independent variable, is a direction that would benefit the field of empirical work on cognition and emotion. Current cognitive theories of emotion offer much potential in understanding the affective consequences of creative problem solving. (shrink)

As individual subjects, creativity and personality have been the focus of much research and many publications. This Cambridge Handbook is the first to bring together these two topics and explores how personality and behavior affects creativity. Contributors from around the globe present cutting-edge research about how personality traits and motives make creative behavior more likely. Many aspects of personality and behavior are examined in the chapters, including genius, emotions, psychopathology, entrepreneurship, and multiculturalism, to analyse the impact of these on creativity. (...) The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity and Personality Research will be the definitive resource for researchers, students and academics who study psychology, personality, and creativity. (shrink)

One formative idea behind the workshop on expertise in Berkeley in August of 2010 was to develop a viable “trading zone” of ideas, which is defined as a location “in which communities with a deep problem of communication manage to communicate” (Collins et al. 2010, p. 8). In the current case, the goal is to have a trading zone between philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists who communicate their ideas on expertise such that productive interdisciplinary collaboration results. In this paper, I review (...) Harry Collins' three-dimensional model of expertise and provide a very brief and non-inclusive overview of a psychological response. In addition, I propose an addendum to the model by adding a fourth—natural talent—dimension. (shrink)