Category: Abstract Thinking

Creativity, Depression and Anger

[A]nger … triggers a less systematic and structured approach to the creativity task, and leads to initially higher levels of creativity. … [However] creative performance should decline over time more for angry than for sad people.

— Bass et al (2011): Creative production by angry people peaks early on, decreases over time, and is relatively unstructured

Here are a couple of studies on the interaction between negative emotions and creativity whose implications require some very careful consideration. We want to encourage creativity, but how and at what cost to the student?

Social rejection was associated with greater artistic creativity

— Akinola and Mendes (2011): The Dark Side of Creativity: Biological Vulnerability and Negative Emotions Lead to Greater Artistic Creativity

Anger

Anger, it appears, leads to more unstructured thinking, thinking that is more flexible and able to make new connections among different categories of information. However, anger’s creativity boost does not last that long – strong emotions take a toll – and people soon revert back to a more normal baseline.

These results come from an initial study, and there are a lot of unanswered questions. In particular, I wonder just how much anger is useful for this beneficial outcome. I find it hard to believe that too much anger is terrible useful. And, I’m also curious about the negative consequences in terms of group interactions. Brett Ford points out that some studies have found that anger is useful in negotiation, but only when that negotiation is confrontational. Another study found that angry leaders were better at motivating groups of less agreeable people. Conversely, more agreeable people responded better to less angry leaders.

In a scenario study, participants with lower levels of agreeableness responded more favorably to an angry leader, whereas participants with higher levels of agreeableness responded more favorably to a neutral leader.

— Kleef et al. (2010): On Angry Leaders and Agreeable Followers
How Leaders’ Emotions and Followers’ Personalities Shape Motivation and Team Performance

It seems that the ability to project anger may be a useful skill to have in one’s toolbox, given the variety of people we will have to deal with in life.

Depression and Creativity

Modupe Akinola and Wendy Berry Mendes point out that highly creative people tend to introversion, emotional sensitivity and, at the extreme, depression and other mood disorders. Unfortunately:

[M]ood disorders are 8 to 10 times more prevalent in writers and artists than in the general population (Jamison, 1993).

— Akinola and Mendes (2011): The Dark Side of Creativity

On top of the general mood, strong, more transient, activating moods, like anger and happiness, also affect a person’s ability to be creative. Both positive and negative activating moods (the hedonic tone) enhance creativity, but in different ways:

  • negative activating moods, like anger and fear, increase perseverance;
  • positive activating moods, like happiness and elatedness, increase mental flexibility.

Curiously enough, although creativity is associated with a baseline of sadness and depression, these two are not among the activating moods that can spur the creativity of the moment.

A Matter of Control

The implications of these studies are complex. I certainly need to think about them a lot more, but it would seem reasonable, or perhaps responsible, to encourage students to carefully monitor their moods and to help them better understand themselves and their behavior. Ultimately, it is probably better if we are able to control how we use our emotions, rather than the other way around.

The pre-frontal lobe, which is responsible for formal thinking, is the part of the brain that can put the brakes on impulsive emotional behavior. It can also, to a degree, modulate how emotions are expressed. As adolescents’ pre-frontal cortex develop, they should be better able to control and use their emotions to their benefit. But to do so, they need to be aware of their emotions and the power of their emotions, which would suggest training in emotional awareness and control.

I’m not aware of any programs or curricula that delve all the way into how to use your emotions proactively, but I’d like to see something that particularly discusses how to use the different activating moods.

Why I [believe/don’t believe] in God

Image from the Opte Project.

Andrew Zak Williams asks 30 believers and 30 non-believers why. Their answers do a great job summarizing the major arguments and philosophies of both camps.

Theists assert a number of reasons for their belief: their need for there to be some purpose in the world rather than see the universe as the result of the unguided vagaries of random chance; profound, spiritual experiences in their past; their perception that the beauty of life and the universe must have had some (intelligent) design; and sometimes, an acknowledgment of the need for an element of blind faith.

Atheists, on the other hand, argue the lack of evidence; the often prejudicial, unjust nature of the religions many of them grew up with; and the fact that to recognize one type of religion as correct, often requires its adherents to believe that the others are wrong, leading to the conjecture that none of them are right and they’re all wrong.

Stephen Hawking tries to thread and interesting needle:

I am not claiming there is no God. The scientific account is complete, but it does not predict human behaviour, because there are too many equations to solve.One therefore uses a different model, which can include free will and God.

— Stephen Hawking (2011) in Faith no more (Williams, 2011) in the NewStatesman.

Many adolescents will be encountering these types of questions on their own or through all the bat mitzvah, confirmations and other religious coming-of-age ceremonies adolescents face. Either one of these two articles would be an interesting, if delicate, subject for a Socratic dialogue, especially while studying the history of religions.

[via The Dish]

The Spirit of the Law

A You are the Ref strip by Paul Trevillion.

Every week, artist Paul Trevillon poses, in text and cartoon form, some truly idiosyncratic situations that might come up in a soccer match in his You are the Ref strip on the Guardian website. Readers get a week to propose their solutions and then referee Keith Hackett give his official answers.

It’s a fascinating series, the subtext of which is that, while there is a lot of minutiae to remember – the actual diameter of a soccer ball is important for one question – the game official is really out there to enforce the spirit of the laws, enabling fair and fluid play to the best of their ability. This is a useful lesson for adolescents who tend toward being extremely literal, and have to work on their abstract thinking skills, especially when they relate to questions of justice. For this reason, I find that when refereeing their games it’s useful to take the time during the game, and afterward in our post-match discussions, to talk about the more controversial calls.

Variations on a Theme

102. Hipsters - Rotterdam 2008 from Exactitudes.

In seeking their identity, adolescents try out a wide variety of different personas. These are often closely associated with changing appearance and style. What I find interesting is how the different styles increasingly cross cultures and other traditional divides (like race). This is evident in Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek’s photographic series Exactitudes.

There’s something sad about the loss of local cultural uniqueness to globalization; it’s a bit similar to the feeling you get when you hear about another interesting species becoming extinct. Curiously, however, when Versluis and Uyttenbroek tile together photographs of different people from the same subculture striking identical poses, they not only highlight the similarities between very different people, but also the minute variations that individuals employs to make the subgroup’s “uniform” their own.

26. Preppies - Rotterdam 1999 (from Exactitudes). Girls, "... at Montessori school."

All 128 pictures sets are thought provoking and worth a look. I think they would make useful subjects for students to reflect on (though, warning, there is a little nudity in one of the sets).

(via Brain Pickings)

Growing up a Scientist

I'm just intellectually curious.

Being a scientist is a state of mind. It’s really a way of looking at the world with wonder, curiosity, and logical rigor. Once you realize that, and get past the tedium of moving little bits of water from one place to the next, or peering through endless mathematical equations and lines of code, you’ll be a lot happier. At least that’s what I got out of Adam Rubin’s essay, “Experimental Error: Most Likely to Secede.”

His memories of growing up a scientist in middle school:

A scientist in middle school: Some of my classmates seem to have gotten large and confident very quickly. And the kids with the most friends are the ones who think science is lame. But I want friends. And I don’t think science is lame. Ah, the eternal question: WWDHD? (“What would Don Herbert do?”)1

Science questions explored: What is the difference between “weight” and “mass,” and why won’t you understand it no matter how many times it’s explained? What is static electricity, and why won’t you understand it no matter how many times it’s explained? What is a hypothesis, and why won’t you understand it no matter how many times it’s explained?

— Rubin (2011): Experimental Error: Most Likely to Secede

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

I get this question occasionally from my students, and the answer is, of course, that it depends on how you define the word “sound”. Jim Baggott, on the Oxford University Press blog, goes into more detail about the roots of this philosophical conundrum, and makes the parallel to quantum physics.

This tree fell in the woods in Little Rock. Did it make a sound? Depends on who you ask.

Physics and philosophy are a dangerous pairing, particularly since if you know enough about one to speak intelligently about it, your probably way out of your depth in talking about the other. Just because you’re an expert in one field does not mean you’re going to be an expert in another. This is especially true of physics and philosophy, which approach the world from such different perspectives and use such different languages: to a physicist, “sound” refers to the vibrations in the air, while a philosopher might argue that “sound” only exists in our minds.

Philosophers have long argued that sound, colour, taste, smell and touch are all secondary qualities which exist only in our minds. We have no basis for our common-sense assumption that these secondary qualities reflect or represent reality as it really is. So, if we interpret the word ‘sound’ to mean a human experience rather than a physical phenomenon, then when there is nobody around there is a sense in which the falling tree makes no sound at all.
— Jim Baggott: Quantum Theory: If a tree falls in forest…