By Rowena Kong
Why do people cry? Sadness does not seem to be the only emotion which stimulates a person to shed tears. We cry when we listen to soothing music and loving words spoken to us. We may even cry when we are extremely overjoyed. In Vingerhoets and Bylsma (2015) review of human emotional crying, the authors listed both the negative and positive antecedents of adult crying and they included defeat, powerlessness, failure, justice and altruism. Continue reading
By Rowena Kong
Research has mostly focused on how various socioeconomic problems and health challenges can limit disadvantaged children’s creativity and success. For instance, the effect of socioeconomic status on academic achievement has been extensively examined. Continue reading
By Rowena Kong
Tylenol and caffeine: they are too common in our everyday life and language to be ignored. When physical symptoms call for our action, we reach for the bottle of Tylenol; to satisfy our cravings, we aim for the kitchen coffee-brewer or the nearest cafe. They are effective and have always been so. But are these remedial actions just about all that acetaminophen (the active ingredient in Tylenol) and caffeine can offer us? Continue reading
By Rowena Kong
Which would you do better at: detecting similarities amongst a group of items, or brainstorming an original title for a thriller movie? Chances are, your level of performance on these two representative measures of creativity can be influenced by the social environment around you, and particularly by the behaviour and backgrounds of the people with whom you interact. One study by Ashton-James and Chartrand (2009) showed that the effect of social interaction on creativity occurred through the activation of thinking styles. The authors hypothesised that mimicry of participants’ behaviour without their awareness would induce a convergent thinking style, and that a divergent thinking style would be observed when participants were not mimicked. Indeed, the outcome revealed that the mimicry condition led to higher scores on a convergent thinking task (pattern recognition) while the non-mimicry condition produced better performance on a divergent thinking task (generation of novel product labels).
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