Heidegger on creativity: From boredom to re-engagement with the world

Experimental psychologists have discussed whether boredom can help us become more creative. At first blush, this would seem to be rather unlikely. When we are bored, we are disengaged; we cannot be bothered and nothing seems worthwhile; we have no interest in the world around us. Such a condition, surely, is not conducive to creativity (Haager et al. 2018). Yet some psychologists disagree (Gasper and Middlewood 2014). Boredom, they explain, breaks down entrenched routines and thought-patterns and provides us with an opportunity to think again and anew. Respondents in “approach-oriented states” such as boredom engage in more “associative thought” than those in “avoidance-oriented affective states.” This is how boredom comes to encourage “the quest for meaning and exploration” (Gasper and Middlewood 2014, pp. 53–55...2-s2.0-8508440789

Group membership and racial bias modulate the temporal estimation of in-group/out-group body movements

Social group categorization has been mainly studied in relation to ownership manipulations involving highly-salient multisensory cues. Here, we propose a novel paradigm that can implicitly activate the embodiment process in the presence of group affiliation information, whilst participants complete a task irrelevant to social categorization. Ethnically White participants watched videos of White- and Black-skinned models writing a proverb. The writing was interrupted 7, 4 or 1 s before completion. Participants were tasked with estimating the residual duration following interruption. A video showing only hand kinematic traces acted as a control condition. Residual duration estimates for out-group and control videos were significantly lower than those for in-group videos only for the longest duration. Moreover, stronger implicit racial bias was negatively correlated to estimates of residual duration for out-group videos. The underestimation bias for the out-group condition might be mediated by implicit embodiment, affective and attentional processes, and finalized to a rapid out-group categorization