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Imagination is relevant in many aspects of our lives and has been associated with creativity and overall cognitive development, yet imagination may also have a dark side. In two studies we examined the link between imagination, anxiety, and loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic. US college students (N = 101, Study 1) and participants from an international community sample (N = 61, Study 2) were tested when that rates of COVID-19 cases were escalating. Across both samples, we found that spending more time in one's imagination was associated with elevated levels of anxiety. Furthermore, frequency of imagination interacted with loneliness in predicting changes in anxiety during, compared to before the pandemic. Specifically, lonely people who spent more time imagining experienced the largest increases in anxiety during, compared to before the pandemic. In Study 1 valence of imagination and changes in anxiety were also moderated by feelings of loneliness, although this effect was not replicated in Study 2. Results indicate that at least some features of imagination, particularly how much time people spend in imaginative states, may be associated with negative mood states, such as feelings of anxiety. Implications and future directions are discussed.

Despite an established body of research characterizing how creative individuals explore their external world, relatively little is known about how such individuals navigate their inner mental life, especially in unstructured contexts such as periods of awake rest. Across two studies, the present manuscript tested the hypothesis that creative individuals are more engaged with their idle thoughts and more associative in the dynamic transitions between them. Study 1 captured the real-time conscious experiences of 81 adults as they voiced aloud the content of their mind moment-by-moment across a 10-minute unconstrained baseline period. Higher originality scores on a divergent thinking task were associated with less perceived boredom, more words spoken overall, more freely moving thoughts, and more loosely-associative (as opposed to sharp) transitions during the baseline rest period. In Study 2, across 2,612 participants, those who reported higher self-rated creativity also reported less perceived boredom during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time during which many people experienced unusually extended periods of unstructured free time. Overall, these results suggest a tendency for creative individuals to be more engaged and explorative with their thoughts when task demands are relaxed, raising implications for resting state functional MRI and societal trends to devalue idle time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since their release in 2007, smartphones and their use have seemingly become a fundamental aspect of life in western society. Prior literature has suggested a link between mobile technology use and lower levels of cognitive control when people engage in a cognitively demanding task. This effect is more evident for people who report higher levels of smartphone use. The current study examined the effects of smartphones notifications on cognitive control and attention. Participants completed the Navon Letter paradigm which paired visual (frequent and rare target letters) and auditory (smartphone and control sounds) stimuli. We found that overall, participants responded slower on trials paired with smartphone notification (vs. control) sounds. They also demonstrated larger overall N2 ERP and a larger N2 oddball effect on trials paired with smartphone (vs. control) sounds, suggesting that people generally exhibited greater levels of cognitive control on the smartphone trials. In addition, people with higher smartphone addiction proneness showed lower P2 ERP on trials with the smartphone (vs. control) sounds, suggesting lower attentional engagement. These results add to the debate on the effects of smartphones on cognition. Limitations and future directions are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated the relationships between creative achievement, cognitive ability, temperament, and vocational interests using a large and diverse Internet-based sample. Ten creative domains (visual arts, music, creative writing, dance, drama, architecture, humor, scientific discovery, inventions, culinary arts) were positively associated with higher cognitive ability, intellect, and extraversion and lower agreeableness. Regarding cognitive ability, there was no evidence for the threshold effect on achievements. Regarding age, younger individuals endorsed a greater number of low-level achievements and older individuals endorsed more high-level achievements across the 10 creative domains. Other characteristics of individual differences (e.g., vocational interests) were more domain-specific for predicting creative achievement. We also introduce a revised method for the assessment and scoring of creative achievements and discuss suggestions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous work has examined the effect of specificity and temporal focus (i.e., memory vs. imagination) on people's cognition and associated affect. Here, using experience sampling methods, we take these previously addressed questions out of the laboratory into daily-life settings. Participants (N = 228) were randomly assigned to a specificity or control condition, and recorded imagined or recalled scenarios twice a day for 1 week. Results revealed a main effect of specificity where specificity prompts resulted in written scenarios that were rated by independent judges as more creative, more positive, less negative, more coherent, and incorporated more sensory content. Specificity had few direct influences on affect, though an interaction showed that imagined scenarios with specificity prompts resulted in reduced self-reported anxiety. Implications and future directions are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study aimed to investigate the extent to which the severity of misophonia symptoms is linked with cognitive control under misophonia symptom-provocation circumstances in the general population sample. Participants (N = 79) completed a measure of cognitive control–a Stroop color naming task, which consists of congruent and incongruent stimuli, and requires inhibition of a prepotent response (reading a word) in the service of a less predominant response (naming a color), while listening to misophonia symptom-provocation or universally unpleasant sounds. Participants' misophonia sound sensitivity, and emotional behaviors towards trigger sounds were assessed using the Misophonia Questionnaire. Stronger emotional behavioral reactions to misophonia trigger sounds were significantly associated with the larger Stroop effect when participants were exposed to the misophonia trigger sounds, but not when they were exposed to the universally unpleasant sounds. This effect held when controlling for the personality trait of Neuroticism and for baseline levels of anxiety. Both elevated misophonia sound sensitivity and emotional behaviors towards trigger sounds significantly correlated with higher self-reported anxiety when performing the Stroop task. However, only elevated emotional behaviors towards trigger sounds were linked with higher anxiety levels at baseline, suggesting that people who experience stronger emotions and behavioral reactions to misophonia trigger sounds may have higher anxiety at a trait level. Limitations and future directions are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent advances in systems neuroscience have solidified the view that many cognitive processes are supported by dynamic interactions within and between large-scale brain networks. Here we synthesize this research, highlighting dynamic network interactions supporting a less explored aspect of cognition with important clinical relevance: internally-oriented cognition. We first present a brief overview of established resting-state networks, focusing on those supporting internally-oriented cognition, as well as those involved in dynamic control. We then discuss recent empirical work emphasizing that many cognitive tasks involving internally-oriented processes — such as mind-wandering, prospection, and creative thinking — rely on dynamic interactions within and between large-scale networks. Our aim is to provide a snapshot of emerging trends and future directions in an important aspect of human cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dopaminergic (DA) system may be involved in creativity, however results of past studies are mixed. We attempted to clarify this putative relation by considering the mediofrontal and the nigrostriatal DA pathways, uniquely and in combination, and their contribution to two different measures of creativity–an abbreviated version of the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, assessing divergent thinking, and a real-world creative achievement index. We found that creativity can be predicted from interactions between genetic polymorphisms related to frontal (COMT) and striatal (DAT) DA pathways. Importantly, the Torrance test and the real-world creative achievement index related to different genetic patterns, suggesting that these two measures tap into different aspects of creativity, and depend on distinct, but interacting, DA sub-systems. Specifically, we report that successful performance on the Torrance test is linked with dopaminergic polymorphisms associated with good cognitive flexibility and medium top-down control, or with weak cognitive flexibility and strong top-down control. The latter is particularly true for the originality factor of divergent thinking. High real-world creative achievement, on the other hand, as assessed by the Creative Achievement Questionnaire, is linked with dopaminergic polymorphisms associated with weak cognitive flexibility and weak top-down control. Taken altogether, our findings support the idea that human creativity relies on dopamine, and on the interaction between frontal and striatal dopaminergic pathways in particular. This interaction may help clarify some apparent inconsistencies in the prior literature, especially if the genes and/or creativity measures were analyzed separately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of the current study was to investigate the association between age and weight-related quality of life in a broad range of overweight/obese individuals. Participants included 9,991 overweight and obese adults from a cross sectional database (mean age = 44.9, mean BMI = 38.3, 75.3% women, 73% white). Participants completed the Impact of Weight on Quality of Life-Lite (IWQOL-Lite), a measure of weight-related quality of life. For the total sample, weight-related quality of life was more impaired with increasing age for physical function, sexual life, and work. However, increasing age was associated with less impairment for self-esteem and public distress. On the sexual life domain there was an interaction between age and gender. Men showed a steady decline in sexual life with increasing age, whereas women showed reduced scores on sexual life in all age groups beyond age 18–24.9. Of note, women's scores on all IWQOL-Lite domains were significantly lower (more impaired) than men's. Thus, there are both positive as well as negative consequences of increasing age with respect to the impact of weight on quality of life in overweight and obese persons.Obesity (2009) 17 7, 1410–1413. doi:10.1038/oby.2009.43 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research provides disparate accounts of the putative association between creativity and psychopathology, including schizotypy, psychoticism, hypomania, bipolar disorder, ADHD, and autism spectrum disorders. To examine these association, healthy, non-clinical participants completed several psychopathology-spectrum measures, often postulated to associate with creativity: the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire, the Psychoticism scale, the Personality Inventory for DSM-5, the Hypomanic Personality Scale, the Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder scale, the Beck Depression Inventory, and the Autism-Spectrum Quotient. The goal of Study 1 was to evaluate the factor structure of these dimensional psychopathology measures and, in particular, to evaluate the case for a strong general factor(s). None of the factor solutions between 1 and 10 factors provided a strong fit with the data based on the most commonly used metrics. The goal of Study 2 was to determine whether these psychopathology scales predict, independently, two measures of creativity: 1. a measure of participants' real-world creative achievements, and 2. divergent thinking, a laboratory measure of creative cognition. After controlling for academic achievement, psychoticism and hypomania reliably predicted real-world creative achievement and divergent thinking scored with the consensual assessment technique. None of the psychopathology-spectrum scales reliably predicted divergent thinking scored with the manual scoring method. Implications for the potential links between several putative creative processes and risk factors for psychopathology are discussed.

There are at least two competing hypotheses of how attention interacts with creative cognition, although they are not mutually exclusive. The first hypothesis is that highly creative people are particularly flexible at switching their attention - that is, they adaptively shift focus among different attentional levels using cognitive control. The second, less common, view is that creative people exhibit attentional persistence, or an ability for sustained attention. We suggest these two views need not be competing, as they may both operate, but on different time scales or on different components of creativity. In the present study we examined the role of attention in real-world creative achievement and in divergent thinking. In Experiment 1 participants with high and low real-world creative achievements identified whether the stimulus contained letters S or H within hierarchically constructed letters (e.g., large S made of small Es - global level; large E made up of small Ss - local level), which were presented in blocks of eight trials per level. In Experiment 2 participants with high, medium, and low creative achievements identified the same stimulus letters, but in blocks of five, seven, and nine trials per level. Results from both experiments indicated that people with high creative achievements made significantly more errors on trials in which they had to switch the level of attention, even after controlling for general intelligence. In Experiment 2, divergent thinking was also assessed, but it was not related to switching cost. Results from both experiments demonstrate that real-world creative acts relate to increased levels of attentional persistence, even if it comes with the cost of perseveration in certain circumstances.

A hypnotically based intervention to enhance creativity in drawing was evaluated in a controlled study. Participants were randomly assigned to either a hypnotic treatment or a nonhypnotic (task-motivational) control treatment. Subjects drew a standard still-life tableau twice. The first drawing involved no special instructions and provided a baseline measure of creativity in drawing. The second drawing was completed after the creativity-enhancement procedure. The drawings were rated blindly on several dimensions of artistic creativity. Hypnotizability, absorption, and debriefing measures were also administered. Results indicated that the hypnotic procedure had significantly greater effects on creativity in drawing. However, there were no significant main effects or interactions involving hypnotizability or absorption. Hypnotic and task-motivational groups did not differ on debriefing measures regarding their experience.