Browsing by Author "Bellaiche, Lucas"

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Open Access
Breaking Bad: Creativity and Organic Chemistry
(2023-04-10) Blue, Michael Connor
Is there such a thing as a “creative person”? The literature on creativity has focused on this question for several decades now, but a clear answer has yet to be provided. On the one hand, some researchers have argued for domain generality within the broad umbrella of “creative activities,” which posits that creative people do indeed exist: that people’s creative talents (or lack thereof) are consistent across all domains of creativity (e.g., painting, problem-solving, music composition, poetry writing). On the other hand, some researchers have maintained that there is no such thing as a creative person, but that people’s creative abilities are instead limited to a particular domain of creative activities (e.g., an individual may be a very creative visual artist, but this talent does not transfer to other domains, such as music composition). While there has been a longstanding debate about the nature of domain-general vs. domain-specific creative talents, whether creativity is domain-general vs. specific remains unclear. To contribute to this ongoing debate, here, I designed a domain-specific measure of creativity for organic chemistry (the Divergent Skeletal Formula Task [DSFT]) and investigated the possible relationships among the DSFT and two widely used domain-general measures of creativity. Results demonstrated no significant relationship between the DSFT and the domain-general measures of creativity, thereby providing further support for a domain-specific view of creativity.
Open Access
Depression and emotion regulation strategy use moderate age-related attentional positivity bias.
(Frontiers in psychology, 2024-01) Faul, Leonard; Bellaiche, Lucas; Madden, David J; Smoski, Moria J; LaBar, Kevin S
Effective emotion regulation is critical for maintaining emotional health in the face of adverse events that accumulate over the lifespan. These abilities are thought to be generally maintained in older adults, accompanied by the emergence of attentional biases to positive information. Such age-related positivity biases, however, are not always reported and may be moderated by individual differences in affective vulnerabilities and competencies, such as those related to dispositional negative affect and emotion regulation styles. To examine these relationships, we analyzed eye-tracking data from 72 participants (35-74 years; 50 female), 44 without and 28 with a diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder during a free-viewing task comprising neutral-neutral, negative-neutral, and positive-neutral image pairs. Emotional bias scores were calculated based on the ratio of time spent dwelling on the emotional image vs. the neutral image in each emotional-neutral pair. Results indicate that healthy participants exhibited a stronger positivity bias than a negativity bias, whereas individuals with higher depressive symptom scores showed no difference. Next, we examined how age and emotion regulation strategy use (reappraisal vs. suppression, measured with the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire) impacted these effects. Individuals with Major Depressive Disorder did not exhibit a significant relationship between age and positivity bias. However, for healthy participants who self-reported a preference for using reappraisal in daily life, increased age was associated with an increased positivity bias. These findings indicate that the emergence of the positivity effect in older adults is related to reappraisal regulatory preferences in the absence of depressive symptoms.