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Researchers have evaluated what people from different cultures categorize as creative.  Data were gathered from people from Russia and the United Arab Emirates.  Kharkhurin and colleagues found that “The concept of creativity varies by culture. . . . Creative daring . . . appears to be a key feature of creativity in the Western, but not in the Eastern tradition.  . . . In the Western understanding, creativity implies originality, novelty and uniqueness, for the sake of which previous canons can be rejected.  The Eastern concept of creativity is based on the ability to creatively interpret existing traditions (and on giving equal importance on the aesthetic side).”

“Portrait of an Alien.”  2022.  Press release, HSE University, https://iq.hse.ru/en/news/551331486.html

Researchers have learned that too much similarity among survey questions can lead to the collection of lower quality data.  A Li-lead team found that “Surveys that ask too many of the same type of question tire respondents and return unreliable data. . . . people tire from questions that vary only slightly and tend to give similar answers to all questions as the survey progresses. . .  Respondents in the surveys adapted their decision making as they answer more repetitive, similarly structured choice questions, a process the authors call ‘adaptation.’ This means they processed less information, learned to weigh certain attributes more heavily, or adopted mental shortcuts for combining attributes. . . . Adaptation could also be reduced or delayed by repeatedly changing the format of the task or adding filler questions or breaks.” Quality of data collected can start to decrease after 6 to 8 too-similar questions.  This paper is published in the Journal of Marketing Research.

“Surveys With Repetitive Questions Yield Bad Data, Study Finds.”  2022.  Press release, University of California, Riverside, https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2022/01/28/surveys-repetitive-questions-y…

McDonald, Bockler, and Kanske studied how hearing different sorts of music influences our thinking about other people.  They determined that “Music is a human universal and has the ability to evoke powerful, genuine emotions. But does music influence our capacity to understand and feel with others? A growing body of evidence indicates that empathy (sharing another’s feelings) and compassion (a feeling of concern toward others) are behaviorally and neutrally distinct, both from each other and from the social–cognitive process theory of mind (ToM; i.e., inferring others’ mental states). . . . we found enhanced empathy and compassion when emotional, but not when neutral music was present during videos displaying emotionally negative narrations. No such enhancement was present for ToM performance. Similarly, prosocial decision making increased after emotionally negative videos with emotional music. These findings demonstrate how emotional music can enhance empathic responding, compassion and prosocial decisions.”

Brennan McDonald, Anne Bockler, and Philipp Kanske. 2022. “Soundtrack to the Social World:  Emotional Music Enhances Empathy, Compassion, and Prosocial Decisions but Not Theory of Mind.”  Emotion, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 19-29, https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001036

Chang and colleagues investigated factors that contribute to spending time in nature.  They found that there are genetic influences on the amount of time people are likely to spend in natural spaces and also on human desire to be in nature.

Chia-Chen Chang, Daniel Cox, Qiao Fan, Thi Nghiem, Claudia Tan, Rachel Oh, Brenda Lin, Danielle Shanahan, Richard Fuller, Kevin Gaston, and L. Carrasco.  2022. “People’s Desire to be in Nature and How They Experience It Are Partially Heritable.”  PLOS Biology, vol. 20, no. 2, e3001500, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001500