Predictors of Creativity in Young People: Using Frequentist and Bayesian Approaches in Estimating the Importance of Individual and Contextual Factors

© 2020 American Psychological Association. The development of creativity in young children has been studied extensively, but relatively few studies have examined the period of adolescence and emerging adulthood in relation to creative potential. The present study uses a combination of frequentist and Bayesian analyses to evaluate the impact of individual factors (e.g., IQ) and contextual factors (e.g., pursuit of creative hobbies) on creative ideation in three cohorts of young people aged 14-20 years. Measures of divergent thinking, specifically the Alternate Uses Task (AUT) and the Overcoming Knowledge Constraints Task, were used to this end. Openness to aesthetic and imaginative experience was the strongest predictor of creative potential for the 3 AUT measures. Moreover, Bayesian hypothesis testing revealed that the best predictive model for AUT ideational fluency and AUT overall originality was one that included only Openness, whereas the best predictive model for AUT peak originality, or the propensity to generate highly original responses, included Openness, as well as IQ and Engagement in Creative Hobbies. No group differences in creative potential were found between the three age cohorts (aged 14-15, 16-17, and 18-20). The study not only confirms the importance of openness to aesthetic and imaginative experience as a predictor of creative potential in adolescents and young adults, but also indicates the necessity to consider the combined and differentiated impact of individual and contextual factors in different facets of creative ideation

Extracting the Groupwise Core Structural Connectivity Network: Bridging Statistical and Graph-Theoretical Approaches

Finding the common structural brain connectivity network for a given population is an open problem, crucial for current neuro-science. Recent evidence suggests there's a tightly connected network shared between humans. Obtaining this network will, among many advantages , allow us to focus cognitive and clinical analyses on common connections, thus increasing their statistical power. In turn, knowledge about the common network will facilitate novel analyses to understand the structure-function relationship in the brain. In this work, we present a new algorithm for computing the core structural connectivity network of a subject sample combining graph theory and statistics. Our algorithm works in accordance with novel evidence on brain topology. We analyze the problem theoretically and prove its complexity. Using 309 subjects, we show its advantages when used as a feature selection for connectivity analysis on populations, outperforming the current approaches

The role of personality traits and leisure activities in predicting wellbeing in young people.

BACKGROUND: The relationship between wellbeing and personality has been studied extensively, but few studies have examined these in the period of adolescence and emerging adulthood. Moreover, the influence of contextual factors such as engagement in leisure activities are rarely considered. METHODS: The present study employs a combination of frequentist and Bayesian analyses to evaluate the concurrent impact of personality traits and leisure activities on five conceptions of wellbeing (life satisfaction; positive affect; negative affect; mental health; flourishing) in three cohorts of young people (aged 14-15; 16-17; 18-20 years). RESULTS: Personality traits were the only significant predictors of life satisfaction and negative affect, but leisure activities in the form of socialising or physical activity, in addition to personality traits, predicted positive affect, mental health and flourishing. Neuroticism was the largest predictor of wellbeing overall, whereas conscientiousness was the most consistent. Lower levels of wellbeing were also associated with higher levels of creative potential. CONCLUSIONS: The study not only confirms the importance of personality traits as predictors of wellbeing in adolescents and young adults, but also indicates the necessity to consider the impact of leisure activities in different conceptions of wellbeing. The negative relationship between creative potential and wellbeing is in line with the literature which shows a link between mental illness, particularly at subclinical levels, and creativity

Correction to: The role of personality traits and leisure activities in predicting wellbeing in young people.

Following publication of the original article [https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-022-00954-x], some formatting and data entry errors were identified in Table 10, ‘Correlations between creativity and wellbeing variables’: The p-value for the correlation between overall originality and negative affect should not have been formatted in bold; The p-value for the correlation between OKC raw score and life satisfaction should not have been in bold either; The correlation between OKC raw score and mental health should be − 0.024; The correlation between negative affect and mental health should be − 0.490

Predictors of Change in Creative Thinking Abilities in Young People: A Longitudinal Study

Previous research has examined how creative potential develops during childhood and has identified peaks, slumps, and bumps during maturation. However, little is known about the causes of such changes. This study employed a longitudinal approach to assess predictors of change in creative ideation over 2 years in young people (N = 76) aged 14–20 years old at the first time point. The analysis employed frequentist and Bayesian methods to evaluate the effect of individual factors, such as openness to experience (assessed using the BFI‐10 short form), and contextual factors, such as pursuing creative hobbies (measured with a leisure questionnaire). Openness at the first time point and change in openness over time predicted change in peak originality. Engagement in creative hobbies at the first time point predicted change in fluency. The findings support the contribution of individual factors, in the form of openness to experience, and contextual factors, in the form of engagement in creative hobbies, in the development of divergent thinking abilities in mid‐adolescence and young adulthood. Altogether, this study suggests that interventions aimed at increasing time spent on creative activities and promoting openness to experience may enhance divergent thinking abilities, which are essential components of creative potential

Iterative Approximate Consensus in the presence of Byzantine Link Failures

This paper explores the problem of reaching approximate consensus in synchronous point-to-point networks, where each directed link of the underlying communication graph represents a communication channel between a pair of nodes. We adopt the transient Byzantine link failure model [15, 16], where an omniscient adversary controls a subset of the directed communication links, but the nodes are assumed to be fault-free. Recent work has addressed the problem of reaching approximate consen- sus in incomplete graphs with Byzantine nodes using a restricted class of iterative algorithms that maintain only a small amount of memory across iterations [22, 21, 23, 12]. However, to the best of our knowledge, we are the first to consider approximate consensus in the presence of Byzan- tine links. We extend our past work that provided exact characterization of graphs in which the iterative approximate consensus problem in the presence of Byzantine node failures is solvable [22, 21]. In particular, we prove a tight necessary and sufficient condition on the underlying com- munication graph for the existence of iterative approximate consensus algorithms under transient Byzantine link model. The condition answers (part of) the open problem stated in [16].Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1202.609

Travelling on Graphs with Small Highway Dimension

We study the Travelling Salesperson (TSP) and the Steiner Tree problem (STP) in graphs of low highway dimension. This graph parameter was introduced by Abraham et al. [SODA 2010] as a model for transportation networks, on which TSP and STP naturally occur for various applications in logistics. It was previously shown [Feldmann et al. ICALP 2015] that these problems admit a quasi-polynomial time approximation scheme (QPTAS) on graphs of constant highway dimension. We demonstrate that a significant improvement is possible in the special case when the highway dimension is 1, for which we present a fully-polynomial time approximation scheme (FPTAS). We also prove that STP is weakly NP-hard for these restricted graphs. For TSP we show NP-hardness for graphs of highway dimension 6, which answers an open problem posed in [Feldmann et al. ICALP 2015]

Exposure and impact of a mass media campaign targeting sexual health amongst Scottish men who have sex with men: an outcome evaluation

Background: This paper explores the exposure and impact of a Scottish mass media campaign: Make Your Position Clear. It ran from October 2009 to July 2010, targeted gay men and other men who have sex with men (MSM), and had two key aims: to promote regular sexual health and HIV testing every 6 months, and to promote the use of appropriate condoms and water-based lubricant with each episode of anal intercourse. Methods: A cross-sectional survey (anonymous and self-report) was conducted 10 months after the campaign was launched (July 2010). Men were recruited from commercial venues. Outcome measures included use of lubricant, testing for sexually transmitted infections and HIV, and intentions to seek HIV testing within the following six months. Linear-by-linear chi-square analysis and binary logistic regressions were conducted to explore the associations between the outcome measures and campaign exposure. Results: The total sample was 822 men (62.6% response rate). Men self-identifying as HIV positive were excluded from the analysis (n = 38). Binary logistic analysis indicated that those with mid or high campaign exposure were more likely to have been tested for HIV in the previous six months when adjusted for age, area of residence and use of the “gay scene” (AOR = 1.96, 95% CI = 1.26 to 3.06, p = .003), but were not more likely to be tested for STIs (AOR = 1.37, 95% CI = 0.88 to 2.16, p = .167). When adjusted for previous HIV testing, those with mid or high campaign exposure were not more likely to indicate intention to be tested for HIV in the following six months (AOR = 1.30, 95% CI = 0.73 to 2.32, p = .367). Those with no campaign exposure were less likely than those with low exposure to have used appropriate lubricant with anal sex partners in the previous year (AOR = 0.42, 95% CI = 0.23 to 0.77, p = .005). Conclusions: The campaign had demonstrable reach. The analysis showed partial support for the role of mass media campaigns in improving sexual health outcomes. This suggests that a role for mass media campaigns remains within combination HIV prevention