Quantifying the roles of conscious and unconscious processing in insight-related memory effectiveness within standard and creative advertising.

To maximize marketing effectiveness, many conscious and unconscious elements are simultaneously employed within campaign advertising. However, little is known about the individual contributions that conscious and unconscious processes make to the cognitive effectiveness of creative advertisements, some of which may also induce insight experiences. To quantify the roles of conscious and unconscious processes in memory effectiveness within commercial advertising, a dual-process, signal-detection technique was adopted to separate the contributions of conscious recollection and unconscious discrimination induced by 80 printed advertisements, among which half were considered standard and the other half creative. A total of 51 participants completed immediate (5 min later) and delayed (3 days later) memory recognition tests. In contrast to standard advertising, creative advertising was found to enhance recognition and to demonstrate advantages in both conscious and unconscious memory, which decreased across the test-time intervals. Further analyses showed that a moment of insight induced by an advertisement, regardless of whether it is standard or creative, can consolidate unconscious memory, whereas advertisements that do not induce insight improve conscious memory. The implications of these findings are discussed.

What makes creative advertisements memorable? The role of insight.

Sudden insight is often observed during creative problem solving and studies have suggested that advertisements can likewise evoke an insight experience. To date, however, there is limited empirical evidence on whether advertisements can trigger ideational insight, and, if so, whether such insight plays a role in advertising memorability. This study aimed to explore the insight experience evoked by advertisements and to examine the role of such experimentally-induced insight in predicted memory and metamemory performance. Participants viewed standardized advertising images sequentially, with each image presentation being followed immediately by a second presentation either with or without a brief description of the advertising idea. Next, participants were asked to recall the three most impressive advertisements. Finally, participants were randomly divided to complete either immediate (5 min later) or delayed (3 days later) recognition tests and to provide retrospective confidence judgments (RCJs). Recall of creative advertisements was better than standard advertisements and most of them evoked insight. In addition, recognition accuracy was greater for creative advertisements relative to standard advertisements and metamemory performance as elicited through RCJs was enhanced. Further analyses confirmed the documented importance of insight for memory consolidation. The findings suggest that insight makes advertisements more memorable, especially those that are creative.

The mental welfare effect of creativity: how does creativity make people happy?

There is an emerging interest in the positive influence of creativity on individuals' psychological well-being (PWB). Considering most studies focused on the relationship between divergent thinking and PWB, only several studies have dealt with the role of convergent thinking in PWB, which should be just as important, if not more so. To deepen the knowledge on the association between convergent thinking and PWB, 423 undergraduates were invited to complete the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale, the PWB Scale and the Remote Associates test. As expected, results showed a positive association between PWB and convergent thinking. Also, mindfulness was found to partially mediate the relationship between creativity and PWB. Potential implications and future research directions are proposed.

Feeling the Insight: Uncovering Somatic Markers of the "aha" Experience.

Whether internal insight can be recognized by experiencing (somatic feeling) remains an unexplored problem. This study investigated the issue by examining potential somatic markers of the "aha" experience occurring at the moment of sudden insight. Participants were required to solve a set of compound remote associates (CRA) problems and were simultaneously monitored via electrodermal and cardiovascular recordings. The "aha"-related psychological components and somatic markers were determined by contrasting insightful solutions with non-insightful solutions. Results showed that the "aha" experience was an amalgam entailing positive affects and approached cognition accompanied by a greater mean skin conductance response (mSCR) amplitude and a marginally accelerated heart rate than the "no-aha" one. These results confirm and extend findings of the multidimensionality of the "aha" feeling and offer the first direct evidence of somatic markers, particularly an electrodermal signature of an "aha" feeling, which suggests a sudden insight could likely be experienced by individuals' external soma.

The Development and Validity of a Chinese Version of the Compound Remote Associates Test.

Numerous recent studies have used neuroscientific methods such as event-related potentials and functional magnetic resonance imaging to demystify insight and creativity. To do so, 1 key prerequisite is the creation of a large enough number of homogeneous problems that can reliably produce insight-like experiences within a short time window. The Remote Associates Test (RAT) and its variant, the compound remote associate (CRA) problems developed by Bowden and Jung-Beeman (2003), are 2 of the most popular and important instruments for unraveling the behavioral and cognitive, especially electrophysiological and neural, mechanisms of creative thinking and insight. However, little research has examined cognitive, neural, or even behavioral correlates of remote association and creative insight in the Chinese context because of the absence of a Chinese RAT/CRA. The present work, based on Mednick's (1962) associative theory, developed a Chinese version of the CRA test with enough items. The reliability, criterion-related validity, and underlying structure of this test were then further assessed. The results revealed that the test possesses satisfactory psychometric properties and is an appropriate psychometric instrument for uncovering neural correlates of creative thinking, creative insight, and associative thought.

Signaling theory in charity-based crowdfunding: Investigating the effects of project creator characteristics and text linguistic style on fundraising performance.

This research investigates the influence of project creator characteristics and text linguistic style on the effectiveness of fundraising campaigns within the realm of environmental crowdfunding. Drawing on a dataset encompassing 2641 campaigns conducted on the Tencent Gongyi platform spanning from April 2012 to December 2022, the study employs stratified regression analysis to discern the factors that contribute to variations in fundraising outcomes. In terms of hard information, the outcomes reveal that organization size, registration date, prior project initiation experience, and the organization's rating wield a noteworthy influence over the ultimate crowdfunding performance. Conversely, when considering soft information, the presence of negative emotional signals in crowdfunding texts was found to positively correlate with fundraising success. However, emotional intensity exhibited a negative impact on fundraising performance. These findings have substantial implications for practitioners engaged in environmental crowdfunding endeavors. When initiating a project, the creator should demonstrate his or her competence as much as possible to enhance credibility and in addition, should try to show negative signals in the text.

The optimal balance of controlled and spontaneous processing in insight problem solving: fMRI evidence from Chinese idiom guessing.

Cognitive control is a key factor in insight generation. However, the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying the generation of insight for different cognitive control remain poorly understood. This study developed a parametric fMRI design, wherein hints for solving Chinese idiom riddles were gradually provided in a stepwise manner (from the first hint, H1, to the final hint, H4). By classifying the step-specific items solved in different hint-uncovering steps/conditions, we could identify insightful responses for different levels of spontaneous or controlled processing. At the behavioral level, the number of insightful problem solving trials reached the maximum at a intermediate level of the cognitively controlled processing and the spontaneously idea generating in H3, while the bilateral insular cortex and thalamus showed the robust engagement, implying the function of these regions in making the optimal balance between external hint processing and internal generated ideas. In addition, we identified brain areas, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), angular gyrus (AG), dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), and precuneus (PreC), whose activities were parametrically increased with the levels of controlled (from H1 to H4) insightful processing which were increasingly produced by the sequentially revealed hints. Further representational similarity analysis (RSA) found that spontaneous processing in insight featured greater within-condition representational variabilities in widely distributed regions in the executive, salience, and default networks. Altogether, the present study provided new evidence for the relationship between the process of cognitive control and that of spontaneous idea generation in insight problem solving and demystified the function of the insula and thalamus as an interactive interface for the optimal balance of these two processes.

Tracking the effectiveness of creative ads with a computer mouse.

This study aimed to explore the impact of creative advertising on consumers' purchase intention and attention. By calculating mouse trajectories in two tasks, we found that when advertising gained enough attention, creative advertising can attract more attention and reduce individuals' feelings of uncertainty when making purchase decisions.

Childhood psychological maltreatment and internet gaming addiction in Chinese adolescents: Mediation roles of maladaptive emotion regulation strategies and psychosocial problems.

BACKGROUND: Internet gaming addiction (IGA) is a global concern, especially among young children. There have been some suggestions that childhood psychological maltreatment influences the development of IGA, but evidence for this has thus far been lacking. OBJECTIVE: The goal of this study was to investigate the association between childhood psychological maltreatment and IGA in adolescents and the mediation roles of maladaptive emotion regulation strategies and psychosocial problems (depression and social anxiety). METHODS: This study recruited 1280 (girls = 690) middle school students with a mean age of 16.09 ± 0.98 years old. All participants undertook a standardized assessment of childhood psychological maltreatment, maladaptive emotion regulation strategies, psychosocial problems (depression and social anxiety), and IGA. RESULTS: We examined whether the effect of childhood psychological maltreatment on IGA was mediated by maladaptive emotion regulation strategies and psychosocial problems (depression and social anxiety). Both parallel and sequential mediation analysis showed that maladaptive emotion regulation strategies and depression mediated the relationship between childhood psychological maltreatment and IGA. CONCLUSIONS: Childhood psychological maltreatment is positively associated with IGA in adolescents. Maladaptive emotion regulation strategies and depression both significantly mediated the relationship between childhood psychological maltreatment and IGA.

In search of the emotional experience of innovative products across categories.

Although the innovative designs deliver, superior customer value has long been noted. However, the emotional experience of innovative products brings remains mostly unknown. This work focuses on two kinds of innovative products: function innovation (FI) and design innovation (DI), to uncover the mystery of the emotional experience, these two types of innovative designs bring. Participants in Study 1 were required to subjectively report their practical, emotional experience of the two kinds of innovative designs. The result showed that the emotional experience of innovation products might be a mixture of emotionality. Also, FI and DI products may cause different emotional experiences performance. Multidimensional scaling was employed in Study 2 to simplify the dimensions of these reported emotions to investigate the difference of emotion dimensions distribution that FI and DI brings. The results showed that DI products mainly reflected strong arouse than FI in positive emotions. However, DI product brings more negative emotions than positive emotions. Whereas, FI product did not show the quantitative differences between positive and negative emotions. In Study 3, the difference between FI and DI in emotion intensity was investigated, and the result indicates that both FI and DI products can bring high-intensity positive emotion. However, the DI brings higher intensity negative emotion and lower intensity positive emotion than FI. These studies demonstrate the first direct evidence of the essence of the difference between FI and DI emotion experience and suggest possible guidance for consumers to avoid the effect of the emotions when choosing innovative products.

The Influence of Trust on Creativity: A Review.

Examining the trust-creativity relationship is important to promote creativity and organizational innovation. The goal of this study is to investigate how trust influences creativity by summarizing existing findings of diverse empirical studies. The impact of trust at different levels on creativity primarily manifests in three ways: (1) individuals' cognition- and affect-based trust has a positive effect on creativity together with the role of trust-derived perspective taking in creativity; (2) interpersonal trust helps enhance the joint creativity of an entire group via mediators such as team communication and commitment together with trust-evoked safety and the motivation to risk proposing, sharing, accepting or adopting uncommon ideas; (3) group trust has a positive, mostly indirect effect on creativity via mediating variables such as collaborative culture/climate and team communication. Potential implications and avenues for future research are also discussed.

An Updated Evaluation of the Dichotomous Link Between Creativity and Mental Health.

The theory of the mad genius, a popular cultural fixture for centuries, has received widespread attention in the behavioral sciences. Focusing on a longstanding debate over whether creativity and mental health are positively or negatively correlated, this study first summarized recent relevant studies and meta-analyses and then provided an updated evaluation of this correlation by describing a new and useful perspective for considering the relationship between creativity and mental health. Here, a modified version of the dual-pathway model of creativity was developed to explain the seemingly paradoxical relationship between creativity and mental health. This model can greatly enrich the scientific understanding of the so-called mad genius controversy and further promote the scientific exploration of the link between creativity and mental health or psychopathology.

The relationships between bilingual learning, willingness to study abroad and convergent creativity.

Convergent creativity is a form of creative thinking that uses existing knowledge or traditional methods to analyze available information and generate an appropriate solution. The differences in the performance of participants in convergent creativity caused by bilingual learning is a popular research area in creativity. A final sample of 68 participants was asked to complete the remote associates test (RAT). The results indicate that a moderate positive correlation exists between bilingual learning and convergent creativity. Students who want to study abroad perform better on the RAT than those who do not, and this effect is mediated by second language proficiency. These findings suggest that improving students' English proficiency and increasing their opportunities to study abroad may be effective ways to promoting convergent creativity.

Unpacking Impasse-Related Experience during Insight.

Mental impasse has long been recognized as a hallmark of creative insight, but its precise role has been unexplored. The aim of the present work, consisting of two studies, was to experimentally probe mental impasse perspective from insight experience, namely impasse-related experience during insight. In Study 1, participants were requested to complete a compound remote association task and a forced-choice subjective experience depiction task that could provide data on impasse-related experience. The results showed that reports of negative experience, such as feelings of loss (t = -5.51, p < .001, Cohen d = 1.07) and personal experience (mirrored by 'other' response; t = -2.62, p < .05, Cohen d = 0.48), were more common in the impasse condition than in the no-impasse condition; correspondingly positive affect and positive cognitive experiences such as happiness (t = 4.20, p < .001, Cohen d = 0.77), ease (t = 5.90, p < .001, Cohen d = 1.20), certainty (t = 7.46, p < .001, Cohen d = 1.36) and calmness (t = 4.42, p < .001, Cohen d = 0.81) were experienced more frequently in the no-impasse condition. These findings were replicated in Study 2, in which participants were invited to solve a set of classic insight problems and to freely report any feelings of being at an impasse. Across two studies, this work suggests that impasse-related experience during insight problem solving is multi-faceted and consists of negative affective and cognitive components. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Tracking the neurodynamics of insight: A meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies.

The nature of insight has been the interdisciplinary focus of scientific inquiry for over 100 years. Behavioral studies and biographical data suggest that insight, as a form of creative cognition, consists of at least four separate but intercorrelated stages as described by Wallas (1926). Yet no quantitative evidence was available for insight- or insight-stage-specific brain mechanisms that generalize across various insight tasks. The present work attempted, for one, to present an integrated and comprehensive description of the neural networks underlying insight and, for another, to identify dynamic brain mechanisms related to the four hypothetical stages of insight. To this end, we performed two quantitative meta-analyses: one for all available studies that used neuroimaging techniques to investigate insight, and the other for the phasic brain activation of insight drawn from task characteristics, using the activation likelihood estimation (ALE) approach. One key finding was evidence of an integrated network of insight-activated regions, including the right medial frontal gyrus, the left inferior frontal gyrus, the left amygdala and the right hippocampus. Importantly, various brain areas were variably recruited during the four stages. Based on the ALE results, the general and stage-specific neural correlates of insight were determined and potential implications are discussed.

In search of the 'Aha!' experience: Elucidating the emotionality of insight problem-solving.

UNLABELLED: Although the experience of insight has long been noted, the essence of the 'Aha!' experience, reflecting a sudden change in the brain that accompanies an insight solution, remains largely unknown. This work aimed to uncover the mystery of the 'Aha!' experience through three studies. In Study 1, participants were required to solve a set of verbal insight problems and then subjectively report their affective experience when solving the problem. The participants were found to have experienced many types of emotions, with happiness the most frequently reported one. Multidimensional scaling was employed in Study 2 to simplify the dimensions of these reported emotions. The results showed that these different types of emotions could be clearly placed in two-dimensional space and that components constituting the 'Aha!' experience mainly reflected positive emotion and approached cognition. To validate previous findings, in Study 3, participants were asked to select the most appropriate emotional item describing their feelings at the time the problem was solved. The results of this study replicated the multidimensional construct consisting of approached cognition and positive affect. These three studies provide the first direct evidence of the essence of the 'Aha!' EXPERIENCE: The potential significance of the findings was discussed.

Is creative insight task-specific? A coordinate-based meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies on insightful problem solving.

The question of whether creative insight varies across problem types has recently come to the forefront of studies of creative cognition. In the present study, to address the nature of creative insight, the coordinate-based activation likelihood estimation (ALE) technique was utilized to individually conduct three quantitative meta-analyses of neuroimaging experiments that used the compound remote associate (CRA) task, the prototype heuristic (PH) task and the Chinese character chunk decomposition (CCD) task. These tasks were chosen because they are frequently used to uncover the neurocognitive correlates of insight. Our results demonstrated that creative insight reliably activates largely non-overlapping brain regions across task types, with the exception of some shared regions: the CRA task mainly relied on the right parahippocampal gyrus, the superior frontal gyrus and the inferior frontal gyrus; the PH task primarily depended on the right middle occipital gyrus (MOG), the bilateral superior parietal lobule/precuneus, the left inferior parietal lobule, the left lingual gyrus and the left middle frontal gyrus; and the CCD task activated a broad cerebral network consisting of most dorsolateral and medial prefrontal regions, frontoparietal regions and the right MOG. These results provide the first neural evidence of the task dependence of creative insight. The implications of these findings for resolving conflict surrounding the different theories of creative cognition and for defining insight as a set of heterogeneous processes are discussed.

Temporal dynamics of mental impasses underlying insight-like problem solving.

Insight problem solving is characterized by mental impasses, states of mind in which the problem solver does not know what to do next. Although many studies have investigated the neural correlates of insight problem solving, however, the question when mental impasses occur during insight problem solving has been rarely studied. The present study adopted high temporal resolution ERPs to investigate the temporal dynamics of an impasse underlying insight problem solving. Time locked ERPs were recorded associated with problems with impasses (PWI) and problems without impasses (POI). The problem types were determined by participants' subjective responses. The results revealed an early frontocentral P2 was linked with the preconscious awareness of mental impasses and a P3a was associated with fixed attention when the impasse formed. These findings suggest the impasse may occur initially at a relatively early stage and metacognition plays an important role in insight problem solving.

Simple mental arithmetic is not so simple: an ERP study of the split and odd-even effects in mental arithmetic.

This study aimed to investigate the effects of split size (small vs. large splits) and odd-even congruency (parity congruency vs. parity incongruency) of answers on arithmetical equation processing. Event-related potentials were recorded from 18 students in a first-answer-then-equation presentation mode. The ERP results showed that the odd-even congruency had a significant effect on the late positive wave in the small, but not the large split, with a late positive slow wave elicited by the small-split and the odd-even congruent conditions. This result suggests that the split effect has priority over parity congruency when both split and parity are at play simultaneously. Specifically, in non-retrieval arithmetic verification tasks, parity is modulated in cases where a direct judgment cannot be reached simply by depending on the split information.