Understanding the role of gender in humor expression: Directions for future scholarship.

Humor expression is a potent interpersonal and professional communication tool, conveying intelligence and competence. This review examines the role of gender in outcomes of humor expression, particularly in professional settings. Despite humor's association with masculinity and stereotypes that women are less funny than men, we highlight findings that suggest potentially nuanced benefits of humor for women, depending upon contextual moderators including humor type and status. However, we also highlight that extant findings are mixed, limited for methodological reasons, and in some cases, inconclusive, necessitating future scholarship. Given that humor can be a powerful tool, coupled with persistent gender gaps in leadership, we call for future research to better understand how, when, and why gender influences the effectiveness of humor expression.

Bright sparks and enquiring minds: Differential effects of goal orientation on the creativity trajectory.

Why are some employees better than others at improving and maintaining their creativity over time? Despite decades of empirical study and theory on employee creativity, the temporal and developmental aspects of creativity are far from being fully understood. Emphasizing the dynamic nature of creativity, we propose that creativity trajectories are nonmonotonic, and that goal orientations explain individual variations in the ability to improve and sustain the productivity (number) and quality (novelty and usefulness) of ideas over time. Our findings from a longitudinal study at a manufacturing company suggest that employees with a learning orientation strive to develop their skills and thus improve the quality of their ideas at a faster rate and maintain it over time. Those with a performance orientation seek to demonstrate their skills, relying on existing frameworks that enable a larger number of ideas initially, yet ultimately undermine their creativity in the long term. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications for fueling creativity over time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

You may be more original than you think: Predictable biases in self-assessment of originality.

How accurate are individuals in judging the originality of their own ideas? Most metacognitive research has focused on well-defined tasks, such as learning, memory, and problem solving, providing limited insight into ill-defined tasks. The present study introduces a novel metacognitive self-judgment of originality, defined as assessments of the uniqueness of an idea in a given context. In three experiments, we examined the reliability, potential biases, and factors affecting originality judgments. Using an ideation task, designed to assess the ability to generate multiple divergent ideas, we show that people accurately acknowledge the serial order effect-judging later ideas as more original than earlier ideas. However, they systematically underestimate their ideas' originality. We employed a manipulation for affecting actual originality level, which did not affect originality judgments, and another one designed to affect originality judgments, which did not affect actual originality performance. This double dissociation between judgments and performance calls for future research to expose additional factors underlying originality judgments.

Middle ground approach to paradox: Within- and between-culture examination of the creative benefits of paradoxical frames.

Thriving in increasingly complex and ambiguous environments requires creativity and the capability to reconcile conflicting demands. Recent evidence with Western samples has suggested that paradoxical frames, or mental templates that encourage individuals to recognize and embrace contradictions, could produce creative benefits. We extended the timely, but understudied, topic by studying the nuances of for whom and why creative advantages of paradoxical frames emerge. We suggest that people endorsing a middle ground approach are less likely to scrutinize conflict and reconcile with integrative solutions, thus receiving less creative benefits of paradoxical frames. Five studies that examined individual and cultural differences in middle ground endorsement support our theory. Study 1 found that paradoxical frames increased creativity, but failed to replicate that experienced conflict mediated the relationship in a Taiwanese sample. In both within- and between-culture analysis, we showed that the creative advantages of thinking paradoxically and experiencing conflict emerged among individuals who endorse lower (vs. higher) levels of middle ground (Study 2) and among Israelis whose culture predominantly endorses middle ground strategy less, but not among Singaporeans whose culture predominantly endorses middle ground more (Study 3). Study 4 further demonstrated the causal role of middle ground in the paradox-conflict-creativity link. To answer "why," Study 5 situationally induced integrative complex thinking that sets distinctions and forms syntheses among contradictory elements, and found that low endorsers of middle ground performed more creatively when they engaged integrative complex thinking to cope with paradoxes. This program of studies offers important insights on harnessing paradoxical experiences to catalyze creativity. (PsycINFO Database Record

Others' anger makes people work harder not smarter: the effect of observing anger and sarcasm on creative and analytic thinking.

The authors examine whether and how observing anger influences thinking processes and problem-solving ability. In 3 studies, the authors show that participants who listened to an angry customer were more successful in solving analytic problems, but less successful in solving creative problems compared with participants who listened to an emotionally neutral customer. In Studies 2 and 3, the authors further show that observing anger communicated through sarcasm enhances complex thinking and solving of creative problems. Prevention orientation is argued to be the latent variable that mediated the effect of observing anger on complex thinking. The present findings help reconcile inconsistent findings in previous research, promote theory about the effects of observing anger and sarcasm, and contribute to understanding the effects of anger in the workplace.