Peacocks, Picasso, and parental investment: The effects of romantic motives on creativity.
- 1 July 2006
- journal article
- Published by American Psychological Association (APA) in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
- Vol. 91 (1), 63-76
- https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.91.1.63
Abstract
Four experiments explored the effects of mating motivation on creativity. Even without other incentives to be creative, romantic motives enhanced creativity on subjective and objective measures. For men, any cue designed to activate a short-term or a long-term mating goal increased creative displays; however, women displayed more creativity only when primed to attract a high-quality long-term mate. These creative boosts were unrelated to increased effort on creative tasks or to changes in mood or arousal. Furthermore, results were unaffected by the application of monetary incentives for creativity. These findings align with the view that creative displays in both sexes may be linked to sexual selection, qualified by unique exigencies of human parental investment.Keywords
Funding Information
- National Science Foundation
- National Institutes of Health (5R01MH64734)
This publication has 40 references indexed in Scilit:
- Psychological Universals: What Are They and How Can We Know?Psychological Bulletin, 2005
- Impressions of Danger Influence Impressions of People: An Evolutionary Perspective on Individual and Collective CognitionJournal of Cultural and Evolutionary Psychology, 2004
- Normative data for 144 compound remote associate problemsBehavior Research Methods, Instruments & Computers, 2003
- Human SexualityCurrent Directions in Psychological Science, 2003
- Effects of Visual Exposure to the Opposite Sex: Cognitive Aspects of Mate Attraction in Human MalesPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2003
- Dynamical evolutionary psychology: Individual decision rules and emergent social norms.Psychological Review, 2003
- Testing for predicted patterns: When interest in the whole is greater than in some of its parts.Psychological Methods, 1999
- Automatic activation of impression formation and memorization goals: Nonconscious goal priming reproduces effects of explicit task instructions.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1996
- Evolution, Traits, and the Stages of Human Courtship: Qualifying the Parental Investment ModelJournal of Personality, 1990
- Preferences in human mate selection.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1986