Creativity research requires assessing the quality of ideas and products. In practice, conducting creativity research often involves asking several human raters to judge participants' responses to creativity tasks, such as judging the novelty of ideas from the alternate uses task (AUT). Although such subjective scoring methods have proved useful, they have two inherent limitationslabor cost (raters typically code thousands of responses) and subjectivity (raters vary on their perceptions and preferences)raising classic psychometric threats to reliability and validity. We sought to address the limitations of subjective scoring by capitalizing on recent developments in automated scoring of verbal creativity via semantic distance, a computational method that uses natural language processing to quantify the semantic relatedness of texts. In five studies, we compare the top performing semantic models (e.g., GloVe, continuous bag of words) previously shown to have the highest correspondence to human relatedness judgements. We assessed these semantic models in relation to human creativity ratings from a canonical verbal creativity task (AUT; Studies 1-3) and novelty/creativity ratings from two word association tasks (Studies 4-5). We find that a latent semantic distance factor-comprised of the common variance from five semantic models-reliably and strongly predicts human creativity and novelty ratings across a range of creativity tasks. We also replicate an established experimental effect in the creativity literature (i.e., the serial order effect) and show that semantic distance correlates with other creativity measures, demonstrating convergent validity. We provide an open platform to efficiently compute semantic distance, including tutorials and documentation (https://osf.io/gz4fc/).

No abstract

It is unclear what role the experimental drug and convalescent plasma had in the recovery of these patients. Prospective clinical trials are needed to delineate the role of investigational therapies in the care of patients with EVD.

Semantic distance is a promising automated measure of creativity. However, it is not yet known whether semantic distance can assess creative products that are both novel and appropriate. To isolate novelty and appropriateness, participants were asked to generate a verb in response to a given noun in 3 different ways: (a) generate appropriate but not novel responses (common cue), (b) generate novel but not appropriate responses (random cue), and (c) generate responses that are both novel and appropriate (creative cue). Automated semantic distance scores and subjective ratings of creativity, novelty, and appropriateness were assessed. When participants were explicitly cued to be creative, the increased semantic distance of their responses represented increases in novelty that was constrained by an appropriateness criterion (Experiments 1 and 2). Participants cued to generate random responses had the highest semantic distance scores, but without applying the appropriateness criterion, their creativity scores suffered (Experiments 1 and 2). Additionally, participants appeared to implicitly apply the appropriateness criterion when generating creative responses (Experiment 2). In conclusion, automated measures of semantic distance can assess novel and appropriate creative responses while avoiding the pitfalls inherent to subjective ratings of creativity.

Attentional deployment is a primary strategy individuals use to regulate emotion. In 2 experiments, a measure of an individual's ability to deploy attention toward and away from emotional mental representations was developed. This measure of attentional control capacity for emotion adapted an explicit-cuing task switching paradigm in which participants had to shift between emotional and neutral mental sets. Experiment 1 (N = 118) showed that those higher in trait anxiety and worrisome thoughts took longer to switch from a neutral to an emotional mental set. In Experiment 2 (N = 42), participants were given a stressful anagram task, and those who switched more efficiently from a neutral set to an emotional set were more frustrated by the stressful task. In addition, those who switched more efficiently from an emotional set to a neutral set persisted longer on the stressful task. These findings provide an initial step toward identifying possible mechanisms through which individuals apply attentional control to emotional mental representations to regulate emotion.