Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, Vol 17(4), Aug 2023, 395-397; doi:10.1037/aca0000630
The articles in this first issue represent excellent submissions that cover a broad spectrum of theoretical and methodological examinations of the ways in which race and culture impact our understanding and scientific exploration of aesthetics, creativity, and the arts. We begin this Special Issue with a series of studies that examined cross-cultural differences in how we view and appreciate visual art. In an interesting contribution to this question, Brinkmann and colleagues examined whether Austrian and Japanese observers exhibit different eye-movement patterns when viewing European art, Japanese art, and everyday photographs. Darda and colleagues tested the hypotheses that viewers’ aesthetic experiences of art are modulated by cultural labels as expressed by artist names and by sociocultural content depicted in the artwork. The final study in this series was conducted by Ho and colleagues who tested the cultural-match effect, according to which people tend to appreciate same-culture artworks more than they appreciate different-culture artworks. Next, we turn our attention to the relationship between culture and creativity, where Chen and colleagues examined the nature of the relationship between creative personality and entrepreneurial success among Chinese art entrepreneurs. The focus of the next set of articles is on the relationship between culture and the assessment and measurement of creativity. First, Kapoor and colleagues examined ethnic and racial differences in creativity as assessed by the Kaufman Domains of Creativity Scale (K-DOCS)—a popular self-report measure of creativity across five different domains. Next, in what we believe represents a major methodological contribution to creativity assessment, Beaty and colleagues evaluated the validity of an automatic method for the measurement of verbal creativity in 12 languages: Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, Farsi, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. In turn, Golbabaei and colleagues focused on an important construct in empirical aesthetics: responsiveness to aesthetic experiences. Finally, Sweeney and Everard addressed an ongoing challenge in conducting fieldwork with Indigenous communities, which is the need to develop interlocking multiparty agreements focused on research outcomes to enable the Indigenous participants who participate in such research to access those outcomes and to use them to benefit their communities. Taken together, this Special Issue presents a broad set of contributions that examined the intersection between culture, race, and the psychology of aesthetics, creativity, and the arts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)
