Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly used in the arts, raising questions about how audiences evaluate AI-labeled artworks. We examined how personality, art interest, and attitudes toward AI predict aesthetic evaluations and authorship bias for abstract artworks. In a large sample (N = 1,242), participants rated 16 artworks varying in hedonic valence (high vs. low) under experimentally manipulated authorship labels (human vs. AI) on pleasantness, comprehensibility, interestingness, and creativity. Participants preferred human- over AI-labeled artworks, but the magnitude of this bias varied across individuals. More positive attitudes toward AI predicted more favorable evaluations of AI-labeled artworks and weaker authorship bias. By contrast, art interest and enhanced awareness were associated with stronger authorship bias, without robust independent effects on AI-labeled evaluations once covariation among predictors was accounted for. Openness to experience predicted more favorable evaluations of AI-labeled artworks both directly and indirectly via more positive AI attitudes. Openness did not directly predict bias; instead, its total association with bias was near zero due to opposing indirect pathways via AI attitudes (lower bias) and art interest (higher bias). Valence strongly influenced absolute ratings, whereas its effects on composite bias score were small and inconsistent across analyses. Overall, label-based evaluations of "AI art" reflect an interplay of stimulus properties and stable individual differences, with AI attitudes and openness playing a central role.
Flow, an inherently rewarding state of mind characterized by complete task engagement, has been frequently observed in the context of creative activities, yet its relationship to creativity is still underresearched. To test whether creative performance and flow are positively related, we had N = 119 students complete the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults and report on their flow during the writing and drawing tasks involved in this creativity test. Spearman correlations showed no significant associations between flow and creativity test scores, neither for the composite score nor for its creative abilities subscores. However, we found a positive association between flow and self-rated performance, which was, in turn, unrelated to creativity test scores. This pattern of null-associations with test scores yet positive associations with self-rated performance was confirmed in multiple regression analyses, taking participants' creative dispositions into account, and in correlations with flow subscores, representing various experiential phenomena that cumulate in the flow state. Thus, our findings suggest that flow is primarily linked to better self-rated, not externally rated creative performances. Overall, the flow-performance relationship appears to be more nuanced in the creative domain than in other activity domains and may unfold mostly on an experiential level.
Human beings can efficiently extract average information from multiple faces, a phenomenon known as face ensemble coding. Although individuals have extensive experience processing ensemble properties, the effect of such experience on face ensemble coding remains underexplored. To address this gap, the present study recruited two groups of participants: art students with 7-14 years of drawing experience and nonart students without specialized training. The study utilized both face and bird stimuli to examine the influence of drawing experience on face ensemble coding ability. The results indicated that art students outperformed nonart students in face ensemble coding, and this advantage extended to bird stimuli as well. Furthermore, both groups demonstrated superior ensemble coding performance for face stimuli compared with bird stimuli. These findings suggest that drawing experience enhances face ensemble coding ability and that long-term experience contributes to improvements in ensemble coding across different categories of stimuli.
The design of space plays a crucial role in shaping human perception, emotion, and cognition, particularly in cultural settings such as museums. However, systematic evidence on how specific indoor spatial and design features of museums influence affective and aesthetic responses remains limited, largely due to methodological constraints. This study examined the effects of four visual design principles (VDPs)-color, lighting, balance, and form dynamism-on affective states and aesthetic evaluations within a virtual indoor museum environment. To this end, eight virtual reality environments depicting the same museum space were developed, each manipulating one VDP at two opposing levels. Forty-seven participants (35 women, 12 men; M-age = 25.72, SDage = 7.52) explored all virtual reality environments in a fully counterbalanced within-subjects design and completed self-report measures of affective (pleasure, arousal, and dominance) and aesthetic responses following exposure to each environment. Cumulative link mixed models revealed significant effects of color, balance, and form dynamism on both affective and aesthetic outcomes. Warm-color palettes, symmetrical layouts, and curvilinear forms were consistently associated with higher ratings of pleasure and dominance, as well as aesthetic attraction and perceived immersion. In contrast, arousal did not vary significantly across conditions, and lighting manipulations did not produce reliable effects on any affective or aesthetic measure. These findings indicate that specific VDPs are selectively related to more positive affective states and aesthetic evaluations, in immersive virtual spatial contexts. From an applied perspective, the results provide preliminary evidence informing the design of museum-like environments, offering empirically grounded guidelines for optimizing visitor experience in cultural settings.
In a series of two preregistered studies, we asked whether negative (vs. positive) social comparison feedback influenced subsequent creative performance, and whether creative self-beliefs, specifically creative self-efficacy or creative personal identity, buffered or enhanced the effects of feedback. Participants in Study 1 were recruited from MTurk (N = 114), and participants in Study 2 were university students (N = 374). In both studies, participants responded to questions about their creative self-beliefs (i.e., creative self-efficacy and creative personal identity) and completed a creative performance task. Subsequently, they were given fake positive or negative social comparison feedback and completed another round of the creative performance task. After data collection, trained coders and two automated scoring methods were used to systematically evaluate participants' creative performance. In Study 1 and Study 2, participants demonstrated higher (vs. lower) levels of creative performance after receiving negative (vs. positive) social comparison feedback (Study 1: beta = .33, p = .014; Study 2: beta = .34, p < .001, respectively). We did not find statistically significant evidence that creative self-beliefs moderated this association. We conclude that under certain circumstances, negative social comparison feedback may inspire higher levels of creative performance. Future studies should continue to examine the role of social comparison feedback in creative performance.
Although aesthetic appreciation is a subjective experience, classicist architecture is often judged as pleasant by many people, whereas modernist buildings may be more appreciated by experts, being somehow disliked by naive observers. In the present study, we aimed at investigating psychological (pleasantness evaluation) and physiological (electroencephalography) differences between architects (expert group) and nonarchitects (naive group) for classicist versus modernist buildings, shown as entire photos (far perspective) and as details of the same buildings (near perspective). At a psychological level, we confirmed that modernist buildings are more appreciated by experts and classicist buildings by naive. Electroencephalography revealed higher amplitude in the posterior P1 event-related potential component for classicist compared with modernist buildings only in experts. The subsequent P2 component was faster in latency for classicist than modernist buildings in naive, but it was faster for modernist than classicist buildings in experts. Perspective also affected P2, with a faster peak in the left hemisphere for modernist buildings when stimuli were shown from far with respect to near in both subgroups, and the same result was observed for the classicist style but only in the expert group. Finally, at frontal sites, a faster N400 was recorded for modernist compared with classicist architecture, only in expert participants. These results confirm the difference in aesthetic appreciation between experts and nonexperts, suggesting differences in the cortical responses associated with style and perspective.
Previous research on the relationship between creative thinking and perfectionism has produced mixed findings, potentially due to differences in the perfectionism scale, its dimensions, and the tasks used to estimate creative thinking. In the current study, 92 participants recruited from Prolific completed the Big Three Perfectionism Scale and three tasks intended to assess cognitive processes related to creativity: a performance-based divergent thinking task, a self-report ideational behavior measure, and a convergent thinking task. We also examined whether age moderated the relationship between perfectionism and creative thinking. We found that perfectionism was positively related to self-reported ideational behavior, but not performance-based divergent or convergent thinking. This did not depend on the perfectionism dimension. Age did not moderate the relationship but was negatively correlated with both self-critical and narcissistic perfectionism. These findings support a positive association between self-reported ideational behavior and perfectionism, while also highlighting the need for further research.
Little research has investigated the link between self-conscious emotions and everyday creativity. In the current study (N = 120), we used a daily diary design to investigate the association between self-conscious emotions and several measures of everyday creativity (everyday creative behaviors, depth and breadth of everyday creative behaviors, and self-perceived everyday creativity). Participants completed a baseline questionnaire and online daily diaries assessing self-conscious emotions (i.e., authentic and hubristic pride, shame, and guilt) and creativity for 14 days. The results indicated that daily feelings of authentic pride were positively associated with self-reported everyday creative behaviors, breadth of everyday creative behaviors, and self-perceived everyday creativity. Daily feelings of hubristic pride were positively associated with self-reported everyday creative behaviors and the depth of everyday creative behaviors. Daily feelings of shame were negatively associated with self-perceived everyday creativity, and daily feelings of guilt were not found to be statistically significantly associated with any everyday creativity outcomes. Exploratory analyses indicated that authentic pride predicted everyday creativity outcomes above and beyond daily positive and negative affect, though the remaining self-conscious emotions did not demonstrate meaningful incremental predictive validity. The findings contribute to functional accounts of emotions and substantiate that self-conscious emotions-particularly authentic pride-are associated with everyday creativity.
According to various theoretical approaches, stories provide the opportunity to enhance empathy and intergroup attitudes. In two preregistered online experiments with U.S.-based participants recruited via an online panel, we examined how narrativity affects the impact of a graphic narrative on reading processes, empathy, and intergroup attitudes. In Experiment 1 (N = 781), narrativity was manipulated by moving the climax from the end to the beginning, disrupting the narrative arc. Participants reading the high-narrativity version read faster, with smoother reading flow, and reported higher levels of transportation and cognitive empathy. However, no significant differences in affective empathy or intergroup attitudes were found. Empathy and transportation showed significant indirect effects of narrativity on intergroup attitudes, but the total effects were not significant. In Experiment 2 (N = 813), the sequence of events was manipulated to reduce plot causality. Participants in the high-narrativity version reported higher cognitive empathy. Empathy again showed a significant indirect effect of narrativity on intergroup attitudes, although the total effect was not significant. This study highlights how narrative structure influences empathy and intergroup attitudes, demonstrating the potential and the limits of narrative design to foster intergroup attitudes.
Historical accounts of eminent creators suggest that they often critique their own work during creative efforts, and that these self-criticisms may have taken their work to the next level. Although the role and importance of evaluating ideas have been established in the creativity literature, less is known about the impact of self-criticism in earlier/mid-creative process stages. In addition, very few studies have sought to identify what attributes of self-criticisms are helpful or hurtful during different stages of the creative process under varying levels of task complexity. Using a marketing task, during which participants provided task-related self-criticisms of their work during the problem definition, information gathering, concept selection, or concept combination, we found that the impact of self-criticisms on creative performance depended on the characteristics of the criticism. Specifically, high-quality and complex self-criticisms during early and middle stages of the creative process (i.e., information gathering and concept selection) led to the highest levels of creative performance. In addition, providing complex, practical, and deep criticisms under high levels of informational task complexity proved important.
This article defines street art experience as recipients' experience of visual or performing arts in street settings, or gray cubes. Street art has become increasingly prevalent worldwide and holds the potential to shape city dwellers' everyday experiences; therefore, systematic research attention is warranted. Existing literature in empirical aesthetics has largely developed from white-cube settings, which typically assume focused and undistracted art engagement. This assumption overlooks the fact that art experiences in gray cubes may also be unfocused or distracted, given the diverse personal, artistic, and environmental conditions on the street. Without a framework that captures this divided nature, current understanding and empirical studies risk overrepresenting the experiences of engaged spectators while overlooking unengaged passersby. This article introduces a theoretical model that accounts for the divided realities of street art experience. The model distinguishes between a life mode and an art mode, associated with minimal and maximal aesthetic experiences, respectively, conceptualized as the absence or presence of aesthetic attitude, selective pathway, aesthetic attention, deep processing, flow experience, and deliberate aesthetic evaluation. Extending beyond the life-art dichotomy, the model proposes eight modes of street art experience based on the interaction among recipient readiness, art identification, and environmental conduciveness. Potential determinants are identified across personal, artifactual, and environmental domains, as well as psychological outcomes including well-being, aesthetic experience, and place perception. Finally, the article outlines research hypotheses, directions, and methods to guide empirical investigations. Although grounded in street contexts, the model may also apply to nonstreet settings, including white cubes.
Dunhuang murals are a significant cultural heritage of traditional Chinese culture, which have different narrative structures due to the influence of the spatial constraints of the cave interiors. How does narrative structure influence people's aesthetic judgments of Dunhuang murals? We have explored it from the perspective of aesthetic psychology. This study explores how narrative structure and semantic cues influence aesthetic responses and neural activation during the appreciation of story paintings through two experiments. Experiment 1 used a 2 (narrative structure: forward vs. backward) & times; 2 (cue type: cued vs. uncued) design and found that narrative structure significantly affected aesthetic comprehension and liking, with forward paintings eliciting higher scores and faster reaction times. Neural activation, measured by functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), showed that narrative structure influenced activation in the frontopolar cortex, whereas semantic cues impacted activation in the premotor and supplementary motor area (M2). Experiment 2 further controlled the presentation duration of the paintings and examined the temporal impact of narrative structure and semantic cues on brain activation in the prefrontal cortex. Results from Experiment 2 confirmed the findings from Experiment 1, highlighting the critical roles of narrative structure and semantic cues in shaping aesthetic responses and neural activation during story painting appreciation. The study concludes that both narrative coherence and semantic guidance are essential for optimizing aesthetic experiences and cognitive processing of visual narratives.
Storytelling has long been hailed as a critical factor in human evolution, notably facilitating group living by fostering the development of advanced social cognition. Consistently, research in Western cultures has shown that exposure to literary, but not popular, fiction, measured via the Author Recognition Test, predicts performance on advanced theory of mind (ToM) measures. Here we report results from 2 studies that aimed to validate the Persian Author Recognition Test and to examine the differential effects of exposure to literary versus popular fiction on ToM in Iran. Across these studies (n = 449 and 454), factor analyses confirmed a 2-factor structure distinguishing recognition of literary and popular fiction authors, and multiple regression analyses showed that exposure to literary, but not popular, fiction positively predicted performance on a ToM task. Exposure to literary fiction also positively predicted scores on a self-reported ToM measure, but this was significant only in Study 1. These effects emerged controlling for personality traits and demographic variables. Gender differences favoring females on ToM measures were also observed. These findings extend the link between exposure to literary fiction and ToM to the Persian cultural context and contribute to the growing body of evidence showing the differential effects of different types of fiction on social cognition.
Works that combine photography and painting present novel challenges for perception. This study identifies the psychological mechanisms underlying emotional resonance and cognitive processing in the perception of Liu Xiaodong's photo-painting synthesis. A comprehensive methodological approach was employed, including 64-channel electroencephalogram recordings, eye tracking, physiological responses, behavioral assessments, and semistructured interviews. The experimental sample consisted of 120 participants: 60 experts (with more than 5 years of formal art education) and 60 novices (with fewer than two gallery visits per year). Participants viewed 12 works by Liu Xiaodong alongside control images under varying experimental conditions (2 & times; 2 & times; 3 factorial design). Eye-tracking analysis indicated enhanced information processing: Gaze duration on faces averaged 6,234 ms, whereas transition probability between regions rose to .47 (compared with .34 for photographs and .28 for paintings). Statistical analysis identified four principal components of responses (explaining 87.5% of variance): empathy (34.2%), cognitive effort (22.8%), aesthetic experience (18.4%), and existential reflection (12.1%). The findings inform the design of art-therapy protocols for trauma rehabilitation, supporting a two-phase activation model (initial phase = 3.8 & micro;s, integrative phase = 4.9 & micro;s). For curatorial practice, a minimum viewing duration of 6.2 s is recommended. Presenting guiding questions before viewing enhanced engagement by 38%-57%. Educational programs should foster the ability to discern the dual aspects of photographic documentary realism and the transformative power of painting. Overall, the study advances theories of embodied art perception by documenting physiological responses that correspond to the thematic content of the artworks.
Dual process theory suggests that creativity relies on both generative and evaluative processes. For preschoolers, researchers have suggested that imagination may align with the generative process and self-regulation with the evaluative process, and children with both these skills may have the highest creativity. In the current study, we examined how imagination and self-regulation predicted creativity across creative domains and informants: drawing, narrative, play, divergent thinking, and a teacher-rated creativity measure. We predicted that the interaction between these skills would predict creativity across domains and informants. Preschool children (n = 103) completed a new measure, the Triple Creativity Task, along with a divergent thinking task and measures of self-regulation. Their teachers reported on children's creativity, self-regulation, and imagination. Results suggested that the interaction between self-regulation and imagination predicted teacher-rated creativity. Using child direct assessments, only imagination was predictive of narrative and play creativity, and only self-regulation was predictive of drawing creativity. Neither skill predicted divergent thinking while controlling for covariates. This suggests that some domains of creativity rely on the generative process (imagination), others rely on the evaluative process (self-regulation), and some depend on both processes' interaction. Encouraging activities that support the development of imagination and self-regulation in preschool (e.g., pretend play) may support the development of creativity across many domains.
