Does Exposure to Foreign Culture Influence Creativity? Maybe It's Not Only Due to Concept Expansion

Abstract

Multicultural experience refers to those experiences gained through individuals' contact with other cultures. This study focused on exploring whether knowledge of different cultures can improve creative performance-and also how multicultural experiences influenced this performance through changes in individual's physiological mechanisms. Study 1 explored the influence of different cultural priming on creative story-writing tasks. Eighty-nine Chinese college students were randomly assigned to 4 conditions: sole American culture, dual cultures, sole Chinese culture or control condition, and made to watch 45 min slides with cultural elements—including pictures, music and videos,—and then they were asked to complete the creative story-writing task. The results showed that American culture priming group's score was significantly higher than the control condition with regards to the uniqueness and novelty of the creative story-writing task. Study 2 was aimed at exploring the relationship between physiological arousal levels induced by different cultural and creative performance. We divided the whole experiment into five stages,—including the baseline, picture, listening to music, watching video, and completing creative tasks. Through Biofeedback measurement, we recorded the physiological indexes of participants in different groups in every stage, including skin conductance, thermal, electroencephalographic, and heart rate. The results showed that contacting with foreign cultures would increase individuals' physiological arousal level and brain activity, which contributed to the following creative task.

You Eat How You Think: A Review on the Impact of Cognitive Styles on Food Perception and Behavior

“…This exploration can also be expanded to identify how differing time lengths in various cultures can affect one's food perception, food consumption, or food choice habits. Tan et al [130] were able to show that small exposures of individuals from an analytic culture to a more holistic culture affected individuals' physiological states, neural patterns, and creativity. Thus, if these parameters were all influenced by multicultural experiences of less than an hour, it would be expected that food perception and behavior would also be impacted, especially given that most multicultural experiences are much longer than one hour.…”

The Mediating and Buffering Effect of Creativity on the Relationship Between Sense of Place and Academic Achievement in Geography

“…Based on fMRI investigations, creativity has been linked to the co-participation of cognitive and thinking processes, which is related to multiple areas of the brain (Fink et al, 2010 ; Boccia et al, 2015 ; Ye et al, 2021b ). Furthermore, evidence from high-resolution EEG studies has shown that the brains of high-level creatives exhibit more right-hemispheric alpha activities than low-level creatives (Arden et al, 2010 ; Tan et al, 2019 ). Several studies have proposed that alpha activities can both promote inspiration and accelerate information collection, activities that are widely considered to comprise the optimum neurologic state of learning and thinking (Fiore et al, 2000 ; Jawed et al, 2019 ; Harada et al, 2020 ).…”

A cross-sectional study on the quality of life and psychosocial risk of migrant workers

“…La exposición a una nueva cultura podría provocar diferentes respuestas psicológicas en las que la ansiedad, la confusión y el choque cultural afectan a la salud mental de los individuos [41]. Este complejo proceso requiere de apoyo y acompañamiento profesional para superarlo.…”