Search

The study of trait curiosity — individual differences in curious thoughts, feelings, and actions — sorts into two approaches. One looks downwardby unpacking and differentiating trait curiosity, with an emphasis on curiosity’s facets, kinds, and parts. Another looks upwardby locating trait curiosity within the larger structure of global personality traits. This article reviews research that looks upward by locating curiosity within modern models of Openness to Experience. Our review indicates (1) that most — but not all — models of Openness to Experience explicitly include curiosity-related facets, and (2) that they tend to favor curiosity’s academic and intellectual forms. In accordance with recent network-psychometric analyses, we propose that a broader sense of curiosity — captured by intellectual curiosity, intellectual interests, and variety seeking — emerges from a large pool of Openness to Experience inventories, and that these curiosity facets are central to the global trait. The literature that looks upward at curiosity would benefit from connecting to the diverse and expansive literature that looks downward at it, and network science models offer a fruitful strategy for building a hierarchical model of curiosity across these levels of abstraction.

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 research examined the effects of funny and unfunny examples on joke production. A sample of 175 adults read scenarios that they completed with funny responses. All participants were instructed to be funny, but before responding they read (a) funny responses as examples of good responses to emulate, (b) unfunny responses as examples of poor responses to avoid, or (c) no examples. The participants’ own responses were rated for funniness and for similarity to the example responses, and response times were recorded. Reading either funny or unfunny examples, compared to no examples, caused people to come up with funnier jokes. Similarity to the examples was low in all conditions, so fixation was relatively modest, but people who saw unfunny examples spent more time coming up with their responses. Taken together, the findings support the growing literature showing that examples are often inspiring rather than constraining, and they imply that good and bad examples spark creative thought via different paths.

A series of crania from the site of Huamelulpan, Oaxaca, Mexico (400 BCto AD800), were examined. Four showed notable cultural modifications. One exhibited a healed trephination, while the other three were perforated through the frontal. The cultural context and significance of these modifications is discussed, especially in relationship to the site of Monte Albán, where trephination was more common than anywhere else in Mesoamerica. The post‐mortem cranial perforations appear to be connected with the practice of ancestor veneration. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A series of crania from the site of Huamelulpan, Oaxaca, Mexico (400 BC to AD 800), were examined. Four showed notable cultural modifications. One exhibited a healed trephination, while the other three were perforated through the frontal. The cultural context and significance of these modifications is discussed, especially in relationship to the site of Monte Albán, where trephination was more common than anywhere else in Mesoamerica. The post-mortem cranial perforations appear to be connected with the practice of ancestor veneration. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Tooth crown lengths, breadths, and areas were compared from five sequential human skeletal samples from the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, spanning the period from 1600BC to AD1521. Almost all of the measurements considered exhibited dramatic reduction over that period. Total crown area declined from 1320mm2to 1262mm2, a change of 4·4% or 9·4 darwins, which is noticeably larger than any previously reported rate of dental reduction in a recent human population. This reduction was greatest in posterior tooth breadths, especially in the mandible. The patterning of the reduction, and of the variance of the measurements, indicates that natural selection was primarily responsible for the change. Of all the measurements, anterior breadths appear to have been the least subject to selection, and posterior lengths the next least. The degree of reduction suggests that selective pressures towards smaller teeth were greater in Mesoamerica than elsewhere. This case provides an example of the value of recent human skeletal series for the study of microevolutionary processes.

The history of it was saved, but it was burned when Itzcoatl ruled in Mexico. A council of rulers of Mexico took place. They said: ‘It is not necessary for the common people to know of the writings; government will be defamed, and this will only spread sorcery in the land; for it containeth many falsehoods.’Fray Bernardino de Sahagún's account of the process by which the Aztec rulers edited their past indicates the magnitude of bias that we may expect to find in historical accounts of pre-Columbian Mexico. Even if this holocaust, and later official manipulation, did produce a single, authorized version of Aztec history, there are many conflicting accounts of events extant today. This is the result of several processes. First and foremost, all of the surviving histories were written in the Roman alphabet after the Conquest. None were direct “translations” of pre-Conquest books; rather, they were new versions of the inherently flexible oral traditions that accompanied these books. Second, different accounts reflect differing regional biases. Itzcoatl may have destroyed conflicting Mexica views of their own past, but many of the chroniclers were from places that were historic enemies of the Mexica, or at best uneasy friends, such as Tlatelolco, Tetzcoco, and Chalco. Each of these accounts preserves some local bias. Third, “history” was consciously recast to reflect current needs. This happens in all cultures, even the Western European tradition, which has traditionally claimed to seek objectivity in the recording of past events. Yet even if exact events are recorded, it is never possible to eliminate all selective bias: at the very least, one cannot record everything that happened. The historian's job is to record what he judges to be important, and structure it within a coherent narrative. In Mesoamerica, this narrative reflected the present as much as it did the past. Because of the cyclical nature of time, future events were bound to reflect past ones. Therefore, written histories were structured so that this was so. Exactly what happened and what should have happened blended into each other, and no need was felt to distinguish between the two.