Prior research indicates that East Asians are more sensitive to contextual information than Westerners. This article explored aesthetics to examine whether cultural variations were observable in art and photography. Study 1 analyzed traditional artistic styles using archival data in representative museums. Study 2 investigated how contemporary East Asians and Westerners draw landscape pictures and take portrait photographs. Study 3 further investigated aesthetic preferences for portrait photographs. The results suggest that (a) traditional East Asian art has predominantly context-inclusive styles, whereas Western art has predominantly object-focused styles, and (b) contemporary members of East Asian and Western cultures maintain these culturally shaped aesthetic orientations. The findings can be explained by the relation among attention, cultural resources, and aesthetic preference.

SummaryInnovation is of pivotal importance to economic growth in both developed and developing countries. The current research seeks to provide insights on how human and institutional factors interact to explain country variations in innovation. Using a multiple source, multinational database that covers a wide spectrum of innovation outputs in more than 120 economies in the world from 2011 to 2013, we for the first time examined both the concurrent and predictive associations of the interactive effects of human capital and institutional support with innovation output. Results showed that innovation output is a multi-faceted construct, consisting of at least three aspects: knowledge creation, knowledge impact, and knowledge diffusion. Quality of human capital predicts knowledge creation; institutional support and human capital have additive effects on knowledge impact; and the presence of both human capital and institutional support is required for knowledge diffusion. These results extend past findings on the role of institutions and human capital in innovation and have important implications for national policies of innovation development. Copyright

The articles in this forum present many innovative ideas on the role of culture in creativity. In this commentary, we first discuss the contributions of these articles in relation to two recurrent themes: (i) where creativity resides and (ii) what conceptual refinements are needed to push the field forward. Next, we outline a process model of creativity and explain the role of culture at each stage of knowledge creation. We argue that successful innovation involves one or more iterations of the following three stages: (i) authoring new ideas; (ii) selecting, editing, and marketing new ideas; and (iii) acceptance of the new ideas in the market. The desired outcomes are different at the different stages, and culture influences all stages of the process. Specifically, existing knowledge provides a reference point for evaluating the originality of ideas; assumed cultural consensus provides the normative basis for idea selection, editing, and marketing; and actual cultural norms determine how likely an idea will be accepted in a culture. Furthermore, different social and psychological processes are at work at different stages of the creativity process, and culture can affect the outcomes of the creativity process through its effects on these social and psychological processes.

As a first step to establish social psychology of globalization as a new area of investigation, we carried out two cross-regional studies to examine lay people's perception of globalization and its related concepts, as well as lay people's appraisal of the social impacts of globalization. The participants were undergraduates from regions with markedly different experiences with globalization

Based on the instrumental account of emotion regulation (Tamir, 2005), the current research seeks to offer a novel perspective to the emotions-creativity debate by investigating the instrumental value of trait-consistent emotions in creativity. We hypothesize that emotions such as worry (vs. happy) are trait-consistent experiences for individuals higher on trait neuroticism and experiencing these emotions can facilitate performance in a creativity task. In 3 studies, we found support for our hypothesis. First, individuals higher in neuroticism had a greater preference for recalling worrisome (vs. happy) events in anticipation of performing a creativity task (Study 1). Moreover, when induced to recall a worrisome (vs. happy) event, individuals higher in neuroticism came up with more creative design (Study 2) and more flexible uses of a brick (Study 3) when the task was a cognitively demanding one. Further, Study 3 offers preliminary support that increased intrinsic task enjoyment and motivation mediates the relationship between trait-consistent emotion regulation and creative performance. These findings offer a new perspective to the controversy concerning the emotions-creativity relationship and further demonstrate the role of instrumental emotion regulation in the domain of creative performance.

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Cross-border transactions are often perceived by the general public as national threats instead of rational business deals. We propose two interpretational mindsets that attenuate (transactional mindset) and agitate (categorization mindset) these culturally motivated responses. Three studies were conducted in Singapore and the United States with various cross-border acquisition scenarios. As predicted, transactional mindset, which centers around cost -benefit calculations, nudged participants to evaluate the foreign acquisition more rationally and evoked fewer social -cultural considerations than categorization mindset, which focuses on categorizing and comparison procedures, and when no mindset was primed. Furthermore, the effects of categorization mindset are particularly strong when one perceives the two transacting parties as dissimilar and when he/she identifies closely with the local culture. We conclude that while economic

This special issue enriches the study of creativity and innovation as a cultural and social process. Authors of nine articles jointly contribute to a nuanced and systematical inquiry into the cultural perspective of creativity. Their topics of investigation include lay conceptions of creativity in different cultures, different natures and manifestations of creativity and innovation, the influence of cultural values, norms, and multiculturalism on creativity, and the dialogical coevolvement between culture and creativity. The collection of articles in this issue presents cutting-edge evidence and lays the groundwork for an active dialogue about integrating the study of culture and creativity.