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Results remain mixed regarding the effects of incubation tasks on divergent thinking, a type of creativity, generally assessed via the Unusual Uses Task (UUT). Using a within-subjects design, we compared 64 participants' performance on the UUT, after four different incubation tasks: copy a simple painting, copy a complex painting, 0-back-task, and rest. We hypothesized that an arts-related activity during incubation (here: copy a painting) would boost subsequent creativity. Five different creativity scores were computed from the raw UUT data, and we provide a step-by-step guide for how to compute these: fluency, flexibility, originality, subjective creativity, and usefulness. Creativity was only modulated by sex; women outperformed men on creative fluency. No other variables, nor the incubations, modulated any of participants' creativity scores. A within-group comparison showed that the unusual uses of our all-Iranian participants were more useful than unique, echoing previous work suggesting differences between Eastern and Western conceptions of creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grouping research participants by culture or language proficiency may no longer suffice to investigate cognitive universals and differences cross-culturally, due to the interconnectedness of our multicultural world. Based on immigration psychology research, we provide a 'proof of principle' for three culture screening tools. Across five online experiments (total N = 440), we developed (1) The Cultural Traditions Questionnaire (CTQ), (2) the Arts Engagement in Childhood Questionnaire (AECQ), and (3) the Enculturation and Acculturation Quiz (EAQ). While these screening tools are tailored to Iranian and English cultures, the procedures provided here are expandable to other cultures. The screening scores predicted emotional attachment to a culture better than traditional variables used in cross-cultural research (self-ascribed culture group, country of residence during formative years, mother tongue). Continuous measures of enculturation and acculturation are potentially better predictors for downstream variables of interest, due to their finer granularity and capability to capture multifaceted cultural identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fine art can be visually pleasing or displeasing; moreover, it can touch us, move us, make us shiver or think. Thus, when looking at a piece of art, different sensory experiences may occur altogether in a multisensory cocktail. Still little is known about what evokes such particular multisensory experience in the art spectator. For instance, Calvo-Merino et al. (2008) found enhanced activity in visual and motor brain areas for dance movements that were liked more; however, these movements mostly consisted of vertical displacements of the dancers' body. Therefore, we conducted a behavioural experiment to study the effect of apparent movement direction on the kinesthetic experience to visual stimuli. We further enquired where in the body participants felt their reactions. Participants rated their responses to a piloted collection of dance photographs which showed snapshots of either vertical or horizontal dance movements. Ratings were made on Likert-scales from 0–10, referring to the participants' subjective experience (visual, kinesthetic, arousal, liking) and perception (difficulty, motion). We expected vertical displacements to enhance the kinesthetic experience in the passive viewer. Further, we compared dancers with non-dancers and Spanish with UK students. Our results confirmed that looking at stills of vertical movements increases kinesthetic sensation. We also found predicted cultural enhancement of the levels of subjective arousal responses in the Spanish sample. The differences between dancers and non-dancers were, however, smaller than expected. We will discuss these findings in view of the existing neuro-aesthetics (Calvo-Merino et al., 2010 ; Cross et al., 2011) and neuroscientific studies (Sedvalis and Keller, 2011) using dance to probe the mirror mechanism in action observation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]