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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 showed clinically significant anhedonia, and 18 met criteria for depression. Analyses of effect sizes comparing the anhedonia and depression groups to their respective controls found large effects, as expected, for measures of depressive symptoms, but surprisingly weak effect sizes (all less than d = 0.50) for measures of general, social, or physical anhedonia, behavioral activation, and anticipatory and consummatory pleasure. Measures of Neuroticism and Extraversion distinguished the anhedonic and depressed groups from the controls at least as well as measures of anhedonia and motivation. Taken together, the findings suggest that caution is necessary when extending self-report findings to populations with clinically significant symptoms.

The Aesthetic Fluency Scale is a commonly used measure of people’s art knowledge. This scale was initially developed for museum visitors, but its usage has expanded to other populations, including non-arts students. The present research used an Item Response Theory approach to better understand the scale’s functioning in two samples—artistically engaged individuals (i.e., museum visitors and art students) and non-arts students—and any differences in scale properties between the samples (i.e., differential item functioning). Overall, terms related to art styles were easiest, the non-arts students had lower scores than the artistically engaged, and most items showed marked differences between the two samples. These results suggest that using this scale to draw comparisons between these populations is inappropriate. Our results also identify avenues for future development of the scale, including expanding the pool of terms used and revisiting the number of response options.

The aesthetic experience of a group of artworks—such as an afternoon spent wandering in a museum—is not simply the sum of experiences of the individual works. In the present research, we explored visit-level aesthetic experiences in a field study of 298 visitors to a museum of modern and contemporary art. In particular, we focused on emotional diversity: the richness, complexity, and heterogeneity of the emotions that people experienced during their visit. After their visit, participants reported the degree to which they experienced, if at all, 10 emotions, from which we calculated diversity metrics reflecting their emotional variety (the number of emotions experienced) and emotional balance (the relative evenness between emotions or dominance of a single emotion) during the visit. Overall, the sample reported a rich aesthetic experience, but there was wide and predictable variability. Among other findings, emotional variety was higher for people with greater openness to experience and among first-time visitors to the museum; emotional balance was higher among people high in openness to experience and people with greater interest in art. The concept of diversity—the richness and complexity of someone’s emotional experience of the arts—appears promising for understanding holistic aesthetic experiences, such as entire museum visits rather than single works, as well as for many other questions in empirical aesthetics.

This manual provides information on the development and use of the Multidimensional Schizotypy Scale (MSS; Kwapil, Gross, Silvia, Raulin, & Barrantes-Vidal, 2018) and the Multidimensional Schizotypy Scale-Brief Edition (MSS-B, Gross, Kwapil, Raulin, Silvia, & Barrantes-Vidal, 2018). Note that complete information about the scales and their development can be found in the source articles for the scales.

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 o...

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&rsquo, open-ended responses to different metaphor prompts were categorized. Poor metaphors fell into two broad clusters. Non-metaphors&mdash, responses that failed to meet the basic task requirements&mdash, consisted of &ldquo, adjective slips&rdquo, (describing the topic adjectivally instead of figuratively), &ldquo, wayward attributes&rdquo, (attributing the wrong property to the topic), and &ldquo, off-topic idioms&rdquo, (describing the wrong topic). Bad metaphors&mdash, real metaphors that were unanimously judged as uncreative&mdash, exemplary exemplars&rdquo, (vehicles that lacked semantic distance and thus seemed trite) and &ldquo, retrieved clich&eacute, s&rdquo, (pulling a dead metaphor from memory). Overall, people higher in fluid intelligence (Gf) were more likely to generate a real metaphor, and their metaphor was less likely to be a bad one. People higher in Openness to Experience, in contrast, were more likely to generate real metaphors but not more or less likely to generate bad ones. Scraping the bottom of the response barrel suggests that creative metaphor production is a particularly complex form of creative thought.

Mental control of musical imagery consists of two components: initiation—did you start it on purpose?—and management—did you alter, sustain, or end the experience after it began?. The present research examined these two components of mental control using both behavioral lab-based musical imagery tasks and self-reports of mental control in daily life using experience sampling methods. Both music students and members of the general university community participated. This project had four primary aims: (1) examining the relationship between initiation and management of musical imagery; (2) assessing how mental control abilities differ as a function of stimulus type; (3) describing perceptions of initiation and management in daily life; and (4) evaluating how well performance on lab-based behavioral tasks aligns with self-reported mental control in daily life. The findings suggest that initiation and management abilities are closely related, people perform equivalently when asked to control tonal stimuli and song stimuli, people generally report the ability to control musical imagery in daily life, and self-report and behavioral assessments of mental control of musical imagery show a modest association. These findings have implications for current understandings of control of musical imagery and identify several avenues for future research.

People visit museums with differing motivations. We use Falk’s visitor identity model to examine visitors’ motivations to visit an art museum. We assess (1) the prevalence of different motivation types; (2) how visit motivations and outcomes relate to visit satisfaction and length; and (3) the relation between visit motivations and fulfillment of expectations. We found that (1) visitors most strongly endorsed motivations and visit outcomes related to exploration and least strongly to facilitating another’s visit; (2) visit outcomes predicted visit satisfaction and length more strongly than did visit motivations; and (3) visit outcomes largely met or exceeded the visitors’ pre-visit expectations. The present findings suggest that outcomes of the visit matter more than motivations for visiting. We suggest that examining the entirety of a visit—pre-visit motivation and post-visit outcomes—may provide new insights about art museum visits that may be obscured when focusing on just one of these aspects.

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, people were relatively modest and self-critical about their specific ideas. Extraversion (r = 0.12 [0.07, 0.18], k = 7) and openness to experience (r = 0.09 [0.03, 0.15], k = 7) predicted rating one’s responses as funnier; women rated their responses as less funny (d = −0.28 [−0.37, −0.19], k = 7). The within-person correlation between self and judge ratings was small but significant (r = 0.13 [0.07, 0.19], k = 7), so people had some insight into their ideas’ funniness.

Magic is an ancient, universal, diverse, and wide-ranging domain of artistic performance. Despite its worldwide popularity, however, any working magician will tell you that some people really hate magic. They seem to see every illusion as a challenge to be solved and every performance as an insult to their intelligence. A distinctive feature of magic is that it seeks to create emotions through deception—practitioners create the illusion of the impossible, which can provoke intense curiosity and uncertainty, but will not explain the method—so disliking magic could stem from a few factors: (1) low propensity for curiosity, awe, and wonder; (2) high needs for certainty and cognitive structure, which make a person averse to uncertainty and to events that violate one’s mental models of the world; and (3) high needs for social status and dominance, which make a person averse to being manipulated. The present research explored people’s attitudes toward magic with a brief Loathing of Legerdemain (LOL) scale. In a multinational sample of 1599 adults, people who hated magic were marked by (1) lower Openness to Experience and lower awe-proneness; (2) higher dogmatism, intolerance of uncertainty, and personal need for structure; and (3) higher socially aversive traits, such as lower Agreeableness, greater interpersonal dominance, and higher psychopathy. We suggest that magic is an interesting case for researchers interested in audience and visitor studies and that the psychology of art would benefit from a richer understanding of negative audience attitudes more generally.

Most aesthetic experiences happen in everyday environments, far from majestic concert halls and museums. This chapter surveys the major lines of research that explore aesthetic experience in mundane “real-world” spaces. We review research on people’s aesthetic experience of (a) other people, especially facial beauty, adornment, and body modification; (b) natural scenes, such as green and blue spaces; (c) the built environment, such as buildings, interior spaces, and urban street art; (d) the near environment of touchable surfaces and objects; (e) music; and (f) the inner world of imagined sounds, images, and stories. The growing study of everyday aesthetics is not a distinct domain of research but rather a perspective on aesthetics that is more intrigued by common, mundane experiences than those that are culturally marked as artistic.

The psychology of art and aesthetics has a long-standing interest in how low-level features, such as symmetry, curvature, and color, affect people’s aesthetic experience. Recent research in this tradition suggests that people find glossy, shiny objects and materials more attractive than flat, matte ones. The present experiment sought to replicate and extend research on the attractiveness of paper, by far the most widely used material in this growing literature. To control for several possible confounding factors, glossiness was manipulated between-person and varied with methods that held constant factors like weight, color quality, and resolution. To extend past work, we explored art expertise and Openness to Experience as potential moderating factors. A sample of 100 adults viewed landscape photographs on either high-gloss photo paper or on identical paper in which a flat, matte spray finish had been applied. Ratings of attractiveness showed weak evidence for replication. The main effect of glossiness revealed that people found the glossy pictures more attractive than the matte ones, but the effect size was small (d = -.23 [-.62, .16]) and not statistically significant. This effect was significantly moderated, however, by individual differences in the aesthetic appreciation facet of Openness to Experience. When aesthetic appreciation was high, people found the images attractive regardless of condition; when it was low, people strongly preferred the glossy images over the matte ones, thus showing the classic glossiness effect. We conclude with some methodological caveats for future research.

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 inconsistent effects of MDD on RT variability, the present research sought to unpack RT performance with several key improvements: (1) a sample of adults (n = 78; 18 MDD, 60 Control) free of antidepressant medication; (2) an unambiguously appetitive task with appealing incentives at stake; and (3) ex-Gaussian RT modeling, which can unconfound speed and variability by estimating parameters for the mean (Mu) and standard deviation (Sigma) of the normal component and the mean of the exponential component (Tau). The groups had comparable Mu and Sigma parameters, but the MDD group had a significantly larger Tau, reflecting greater intraindividual RT variability. The findings suggest that MDD's effect on average RT can stem from greater intraindividual variability, not from overall slowness. Possible mechanisms, such as impaired executive processes in MDD and difficulties maintaining stable mental representations of incentives, are considered.

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 musical imagery) vs. management (modifying, stopping, or sustaining musical imagery) as facets of control, and the present research examined people’s ability to use these two forms of control in daily life. For seven days, students (29 music students, 29 non-music students) were signaled 10 times daily and asked to initiate musical imagery and to perform manipulations on initiated and ongoing imagery (e.g., increasing the tempo, changing the vocalist’s gender). When asked, people reported exerting control over the initiation and management of their musical imagery most of the time. As expected, music students reported controlling their musical imagery more often and more easily. This work suggests that people’s control over their musical imagery is stronger and more flexible than prior work implies.

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 course outcomes (final grade and situational interest evoked by material). Undergraduates (N = 851) from ten psychology classes at two US universities responded to thought probes presented during two early-course lectures; they also indicated sitting in the front, middle, or back of the classroom. At each probe, students categorized their thought content, such as indicating on-task thought or TUT. Students also completed online, academic-self-report questionnaires at the beginning of the course and a situational interest questionnaire at the end. Average TUT rate was 24% but individuals’ rates varied widely (SD = 18%). TUT rates also increased substantially from the front to back of the classroom, and modestly from the first to second half of class periods. Multiple-group analyses (with ten classroom groups) indicated that: (a) classroom media-multitasking habits, initial interest in the course topic, and everyday propensity for mind-wandering and boredom accounted for unique variance in TUT rate (beyond other predictors); (b) TUT rate accounted for unique (modest) variance in course grades and situational interest; and (c) classroom media multitasking and propensity for mind-wandering and boredom had indirect associations with course grades via TUT rate, and these predictor variables, along with initial interest, had indirect associations with end-of-term situational interest via TUT rate. Some academic traits and behaviors predict course outcomes in part because they predict off-task thought during class. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13421-021-01156-3.

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 research examined the context and subjective musical content of aesthetic crying. A sample of 961 adults described the emotional tone, musical features, and social and environmental contexts of a feeling like crying experience. Awe experiences more often involved religious or classical music that was complex and beautiful, and people were often with others and hearing the music live. Sad experiences more often involved popular genres (e.g., Pop, Soul or R&B, Country) that were cold and unpleasant, and people often noted that the music reminded them of someone or that they already felt like crying before listening to the music. The distinctions between these two kinds of experiences suggest that current theories of aesthetic crying could be fruitfully expanded.

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.

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 creative activity and the level of creative achievement across 8 creative domains. A formal test analysis based on 7 Little-C samples and 2 Pro-C samples (overall N = 1,566) provides evidence for the reliability and validity of the ICAA test scores. The analyses shed light on the prevalence of specific creative activity and achievement and examine the relevance of personality, creative potential, and intelligence across domains of creativity. The findings further suggest that the assessment of creative activity is particularly suited for Little-C creativity, whereas the assessment of creative achievement appears more appropriate for Pro-C creativity. The ICAA offers researchers a broad and versatile assessment tool for studying creativity across domains and levels.

Openness to experience—the enjoyment of novel experiences, ideas, and unconventional perspectives—has shown several connections to cognition that suggest open people might have different cognitive processes than those low in openness. People high in openness are more creative, have broader general knowledge, and show greater cognitive flexibility. The associative structure of semantic memory might be one such cognitive process that people in openness differ in. In this study, 497 people completed a measure of openness to experience and verbal fluency. Three groups of high (n = 115), moderate (n = 121), and low (n = 118) openness were created to construct semantic networks—graphical models of semantic associations that provide quantifiable representations of how these associations are organized—from their verbal fluency responses. The groups were compared on graph theory measures of their respective semantic networks. The semantic network analysis revealed that as openness increased, the rigidity of the semantic structure decreased and the interconnectivity increased, suggesting greater flexibility of associations. Semantic structure also became more condensed and had better integration, which facilitates open people’s ability to reach more unique associations. These results were supported by open people coming up with more individual and unique responses, starting with less conventional responses, and having a flatter frequency proportion slope than less open people. In summary, the semantic network structure of people high in openness to experience supports the retrieval of remote concepts via short associative pathways, which promotes unique combinations of disparate concepts that are key for creative cognition.

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 reported whether they could remember a time when they cried or felt like crying when listening to music; people who recalled an event then rated it on a wide range of emotional states. A latent class analysis identified 2 underlying clusters of experiences: a 'sad' class defined by feeling sad, upset, and depressed, and an 'awe' class defined by feeling euphoric, amazed, happy, and inspired. People high in openness to experience were more likely to recall an event in the 'awe' class; people high in neuroticism were more likely to recall an event in the 'sad' class. These findings illustrate that feeling like crying from music can reflect different underlying states, and it adds to the growing literature on the complexity of powerful and transcendent aesthetic experiences.

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 general and specific contributions of cognitive factors to humor ability. It extended past research by (a) measuring a broader range of cognitive abilities, including some that have not been assessed thus far, (b) assessing humor with a broader battery of tasks, and (c) using bifactor models to estimate both general and specific effects of intelligence on humor. A sample of 270 young adults completed measures of fluid reasoning (Gf), vocabulary knowledge (Gc), and broad retrieval ability (Gr) along with a battery of humor production tasks. All 3 specific factors correlated with humor ability, and a higher order model found a large effect of g on humor ability (s = .51 [.32, .70]). In a bifactor model, however, humor ability was predicted primarily by g and Gr but not Gf, suggesting that fluid intelligence’s correlation with humor ability found in past studies is carried by g. These findings illustrate both general and specific effects of intelligence on humor, and they expand the growing literature on the important role of intelligence in creative thought.

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 trait is also positively associated with mixed appraisals (i.e., concurrent positive and negative stimulus evaluations). Participants (N = 225) appraised 18 visual artworks. Higher Openness/Intellect predicted stronger mixed appraisals, particularly of the artworks rated as more mixed on average. Openness/Intellect also predicted stronger within-person positive relations between artwork viewing time and mixed appraisals, though this finding was less consistent across measures. It also appeared that Neuroticism might predict a lesser tendency to make mixed appraisals. This study provides a foundation for future research examining individual differences in mixed appraisals.

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 that assess positive, negative, and disorganized schizotypy and has comparable content coverage and psychometric properties as the original 77-item Multidimensional Schizotypy Scale. Two large samples (n = 1430 and 1289) completed the MSS-B, as well as measures of schizotypal personality traits and the Five-Factor Model of Personality. MSS-B scores were computed from the full-length scale in sample 1, whereas participants in sample 2 were administered the MSS-B. The psychometric properties and intercorrelations of the MSS-B subscales were consistent with findings from the original derivation samples, with no shrinkage in reliability. In terms of relations with schizotypal traits, the MSS-B positive schizotypy dimension had its strongest association with cognitive-perceptual schizotypal traits, MSS-B negative schizotypy had its strongest association with interpersonal schizotypal traits, and MSS-B disorganized schizotypy had its strongest association with disorganized schizotypal traits. The schizotypy dimensions were characterized by hypothesized patterns of distinct associations with the Five-Factor Model. The present findings are consistent with results from the full-scale MSS.

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 uncovering common dimensions of schizotypy. In the present study, we aimed to advance the construct of schizotypy, measured by the Wisconsin Schizotypy Scales-Short Forms (WSS-SF), beyond this general scope by applying two different psychometric network filtering approaches-the state-of-the-art approach (lasso), which has been employed in previous studies, and an alternative approach (information-filtering networks; IFNs). First, we applied both filtering approaches to two large, independent samples of WSS-SF data (ns = 5,831 and 2,171) and assessed each approach's representation of the WSS-SF's schizotypy construct. Both filtering approaches produced results similar to those from traditional methods, with the IFN approach producing results more consistent with previous theoretical interpretations of schizotypy. Then we evaluated how well both filtering approaches reproduced the global and local network characteristics of the two samples. We found that the IFN approach produced more consistent results for both global and local network characteristics. Finally, we sought to evaluate the predictability of the network centrality measures for each filtering approach, by determining the core, intermediate, and peripheral items on the WSS-SF and using them to predict interview reports of schizophrenia-spectrum symptoms. We found some similarities and differences in their effectiveness, with the IFN approach's network structure providing better overall predictive distinctions. We discuss the implications of our findings for schizotypy and for psychometric network analysis more generally.

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 from the full-length Multidimensional Schizotypy Scale, and the positive, negative, and disorganized subscales were designed to provide the same content coverage as the original subscales. Scale development involved a derivation sample (n = 6265) and a separate cross-validation sample (n = 1000), both drawn from four universities and Amazon Mechanical Turk. The MSS-B was derived using classical test theory, item response theory, and differential item functioning. The three subscales exhibited high internal-consistency reliability, good item- and model-fit, good test information functions, and expected patterns of intercorrelations and associations with neuroticism, sex, and race/ethnicity. This pattern of findings was almost identical between the derivation and cross-validation samples. Furthermore, the pattern of findings was closely comparable for MSS-B subscales and the full-length MSS subscales. The MSS-B appears to offer a promising brief measure for assessing schizotypy.

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 imaging analysis—connectome-based predictive modeling—to identify a brain network associated with high-creative ability, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data acquired from 163 participants engaged in a classic divergent thinking task. At the behavioral level, we found a strong correlation between creative thinking ability and self-reported creative behavior and accomplishment in the arts and sciences (r = 0.54). At the neural level, we found a pattern of functional brain connectivity related to high-creative thinking ability consisting of frontal and parietal regions within default, salience, and executive brain systems. In a leave-one-out cross-validation analysis, we show that this neural model can reliably predict the creative quality of ideas generated by novel participants within the sample. Furthermore, in a series of external validation analyses using data from two independent task fMRI samples and a large task-free resting-state fMRI sample, we demonstrate robust prediction of individual creative thinking ability from the same pattern of brain connectivity. The findings thus reveal a whole-brain network associated with high-creative ability comprised of cortical hubs within default, salience, and executive systems—intrinsic functional networks that tend to work in opposition—suggesting that highly creative people are characterized by the ability to simultaneously engage these large-scale brain networks.

The words “wage theft” frequently make headlines when workers sue employers for underpayment or nonpayment of wages. [1] Wage theft is “the illegal refusal by an employer to pay a worker the wages and benefits that he or she has legally earned.” [2] In the United States, employer violation of wage and hour laws is a vast and enduring problem, affecting as many as two-thirds of workers. In an attempt to combat this epidemic threat to hourly workers’ bottom lines, legislatures have fashioned numerous laws, some even invoking the power of “wage theft” terminology, such as New York’s Wage Theft Prevention Act. [3] However, despite the pervasive usage of the term “wage theft” by the media, politicians, and pundits, a search of the term “wage theft” in legal libraries yields little precedent. This begs the question: can employers be liable for conversion for failing to compensate employees for time-spent working? The efficacy of conversion claims in wage related lawsuits remains an unsettled question. However, if as a society we are sounding the alarm in every incidence of possible wage and hour law violations, we ultimately misinform the population of potential plaintiffs regarding the viability of a claim for theft, or conversion, of earned yet unpaid wages. The term “wage theft” is not a term of art; its closest legal corollary is the common law tort of conversion. Although we as a society frequently identify underpayment or nonpayment of wages as “wage theft,” pleading and proving that the employer has converted an employee’s wages presents an array of challenges that few plaintiffs can overcome. In this paper, we will explore the term “wage theft” as used in our society, and we will contrast this common understanding with the strict legal framework within which plaintiffs must present “wage theft” claims. Finally, we will explore this disconnect in an attempt to reconcile why such a gap exists, and persists, between the commonplace description of a worker’s reality, and the laws available to make the worker whole again. While it appears the term “wage theft” equates more readily with an exclamation of outrage than an effective claim for relief, its persistence underscores the continuing need for common law remedies, like conversion, to fill in the enforcement gaps left behind by persistently reactive legislation. [1] See Brady Meixell and Ross Eisenbrey, An Epidemic of Wage Theft Is Costing Workers Hundreds of Millions of Dollars a Year, Economic Policy Institute (Sep. 11, 2014), http://www.epi.org/publication/epidemic-wage-theft-costing-workers-hundreds/; Josh Eidelson, LinkedIn Stiffed its Own Employees, Agrees to Pay Millions, BUSINESSWEEK (Aug. 5, 2014), https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-08-05/linkedin-stiffed-its-own-employees-agrees-to-pay-millions; and Monica Potts, The Very Real Scourge of Wage Theft, THE DAILY BEAST (Feb. 15, 2015), http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/02/15/the-very-real-scourge-of-wage-theft.html. [2] Hilda L. Solis, Wage Theft Harms All of Us , The Huffington Post (July 19, 2015), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hilda-l-solis/wage-theft-harms-all-of-u_b_7829514.html. [3] Wage Theft Prevention Act, 2009 N.Y.S.N. 8380 (Apr. 12, 2011).

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 scales measuring humor self-efficacy (“I can” beliefs reflecting confidence about one's ability to be funny) and humor identity (“I am” beliefs reflecting the centrality of humor ability to one's self-concept). Using a large sample of English speakers (n = 1842), an item response theory analysis found a suitable range of item difficulty, good item discrimination, and essentially zero gender-based differential item functioning. Three follow-up samples with English (n = 304, n = 400) and Polish (n = 385) speakers found conceptually consistent relationships with humor backgrounds and experiences (e.g., taking classes and holding jobs involving humor), with Big 5 personality traits, and with humor styles and playfulness. Taken together, these scales show promise for research on people's humor self-concepts and for studies of gendered aspects of humor use, creation, and appreciation.

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 of metal objects. Young adults ( n = 134) viewed silver coins that were either dull or in “brilliant uncirculated” condition as well as copper cylinders that were either rough and tarnished, polished with a brushed surface, or polished with a mirror finish. Ratings of attractiveness showed that people preferred the shiny over the tarnished coin and the glossy copper bar over the tarnished and brushed ones. These effects were not simply due to perceived quality or implied effort. The findings demonstrate that, after many potential confounds have been avoided or controlled for, people do seem to have a thing for bling.

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 life. A sample of 39 depressed adults (85% female, mean age 38) were signaled twice per week throughout the course of either cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) or self-system therapy (SST). Results showed that, on days when participants reported greater use of therapy skills, they reported better mood and functioning in almost all domains. Additionally, participants in CBT reported greater use of cognitive skills while participants in SST reported greater use of self-regulatory skills. This study demonstrates that repeated assessments of daily events and experiences, which prevent retrospective reporting biases, further confirm the importance of therapy skill use as a mechanism of action in psychotherapy.

Open people show greater interest in situations that are complex, novel, and difficult to understand-situations that may also be experienced as confusing. Here we investigate the possibility that openness/intellect is centrally characterized by more positive relations between interest and confusion. Interest and confusion are key states experienced during engagement with information and learning. However, little is known about the within-person relation between them, let alone individual differences in this relation. We tested our hypotheses by making use of different paradigms, stimuli, and participants. Across five studies (N = 640) we tested the relation between openness/intellect and within-person interest-confusion relations in response to art (Study 1); science, philosophy, and art (Study 2); psychology lectures (Study 3); a poem (Study 4); and a complex problem solving task (Study 5). Average interest-confusion relations varied between different studies, but for all studies the distributions of the relations went from highly negative to highly positive-individual differences in direction rather than just degree. In all but 1 study we found consistent support for our hypotheses-openness/intellect is associated with more positive relations between interest and confusion. No other personality domain or intelligence was consistently related to interest-confusion relations. Together, these findings suggest a new phenomenological aspect of being open-curiosity toward confusing situations. Our findings support the link between openness/intellect and sensitivity to the value of complex information, and are discussed with regards to their relevance for engagement with information and learning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved). ispartof: Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology vol:117 issue:5 pages:1016-1033 ispartof: location:United States status: published

Curiosity is an old, intriguing, and vexing construct in the psychology of motivation. This chapter reviews the major strands of thought on curiosity and motivation: (1) curiosity as a motive to reduce negative states, such as uncertainty, novelty, arousal, drive, or information gaps; (2) curiosity as a source of intrinsic motivation that fosters learning and exploring for their own sakes; and (3) curiosity as a stable motivational difference between people that leads to differences in knowledge, goals, achievement, and experience. The scope of psychological thought on curiosity defies a simple integration, but it offers inspiration for researchers curious about why people learn and explore in the absence of obvious external rewards.

Cognitive and neuroimaging evidence suggests that episodic and semantic memory-memory for autobiographical events and conceptual knowledge, respectively-support different aspects of creative thinking, with a growing number of studies reporting activation of brain regions within the default network during performance on creative thinking tasks. The present research sought to dissociate neural contributions of these memory processes by inducing episodic or semantic retrieval orientations prior to performance on a divergent thinking task during fMRI. We conducted a representational similarity analysis (RSA) to identify multivoxel patterns of neural activity that were similar across induction (episodic and semantic) and idea generation. At the behavioral level, we found that semantic induction was associated with increased idea originality, assessed via computational estimates of semantic distance between concepts. RSA revealed that multivoxel patterns during semantic induction and subsequent idea generation were more similar (compared to episodic induction) within the left angular gyrus (AG), posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), and left anterior inferior parietal lobe (IPL). Conversely, activity patterns during episodic induction and subsequent generation were more similar within left parahippocampal gyrus and right anterior IPL. Together, the findings point to dissociable contributions of episodic and semantic memory processes to creative cognition and suggest that distinct regions within the default network support specific memory-related processes during divergent thinking.

Functional neuroimaging research has recently begun to explore cognitive mechanisms of creativity that underlie the interactions between large-scale brain networks—specifically regions of the executive control (ECN) and default (DN) networks. Increased ECN-DN coupling has been shown to occur when participants are required to overcome conceptual interference (i.e., activation of salient conceptual knowledge); however, most studies have used creativity tasks with verbal stimuli. Here we examine whether overcoming conceptual interference elicits these interactions during a creativity task with visual stimuli, which may suggest that these interactions are a domain general neural mechanism (i.e., across multiple modalities). We used independent component analysis to identify task related functional connectivity networks during novel imagery generation under High- and Low-Constraint conditions (i.e., interference and no interference, respectively). Consistent with our expectations, our results showed greater connectivity between ECN and DN components during the High-Constraint condition compared to the Low-Constraint condition. In contrast to previous research using verbal tasks, our results showed that the ECN had greater connectivity with the posterior, rather than anterior, DN. Our results suggest that ECN-DN coupling may be a domain-general neural mechanism that underlies creative cognition, but stimulus modality may affect which specific regions within these networks are involved.

Metaphors are widely used to convey abstract concepts and emotions in the arts and everyday life. Neuroimaging research suggests that dynamic interactions among large-scale brain networks, including the default and executive control networks, support the production of such creative ideas. However, the extent to which these networks interact to support other forms of creative language production such as metaphor remains unknown. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we explored this question by assessing functional interactions between brain regions during novel metaphor production. Whole-brain functional connectivity analysis revealed a distributed network associated with metaphor production, including several nodes of the default (precuneus and left angular gyrus; AG) and executive control (right intraparietal sulcus; IPS) networks. Seed-based analyses showed increased connectivity between these network hubs, and temporal connectivity analysis found early coupling of default (left AG) and salience (right anterior insula) regions that preceded later coupling of the left AG and left DLPFC, pointing to a potential switching mechanism underlying default and executive network interaction. The results extend recent work on the cooperative role of large-scale networks in creative cognition, and suggest that metaphor production involves similar brain network dynamics as other forms of goal-directed, self-generated cognition.