Motor expressions as creativity support: Exploring the potential for physical interaction

This research explores the effects of physical interactions designed on the basis of motor expressions to support creative ideation in creativity support technologies. The presented research looks into the effects on creative ideation of incompatibility between motor expressions and problem situations, and appraisals of (un)pleasantness. We report the results of a preliminary study which suggests that affective incompatibility between a problem situation and a motor expression benefits creative ideation, and that pleasantness motor expressions enhance task enjoyment, which in turn leads to a beneficial effect on the originality of ideas generated. Based on these results, we conclude with two new directions for the design of physical interactions with novel creativity support technologies

Mood and creativity: an appraisal tendency perspective

There is a strong relationship between the mood one is in, and the way one performs creatively. Previous research has shown that this relationship is complex. In this paper we argue that this complexity partly lies in a faulty conceptualization of mood. We will argue that an appraisal tendency perspective on moods will help to further clarify the relationship between mood and creativity. To support this argument we will highlight some inconsistencies in previous research, and use the appraisal tendency perspective on mood to develop predictions that help explain these inconsistencies and develop new directions for mood-creativity research. Future research is required to assess the accuracy of these predictions

Surface-micromachined Ta–Si–N beams for use in micromechanics

Realization and characterization of free-standing surface-microstructures based on Ta-Si-N films are presented. Due to their significant physical and chemical properties, such ternary films are promising candidates for application in microelectromechanical devices

All in the Family: Partisan Disagreement and Electoral Mobilization in Intimate Networks - a Spillover Experiment

We advance the debate about the impact of political disagreement in social networks on electoral participation by addressing issues of causal inference common in network studies, focusing on voters' most important context of interpersonal influence: the household. We leverage a randomly assigned spillover experiment conducted in the United Kingdom, combined with a detailed database of pretreatment party preferences and public turnout records, to identify social influence within heterogeneous and homogeneous partisan households. Our results show that intrahousehold mobilization effects are larger as a result of campaign contact in heterogeneous than in homogeneous partisan households, and larger still when the partisan intensity of the message is exogenously increased, suggesting discussion rather than behavioral contagion as a mechanism. Our results qualify findings from influential observational studies and suggest that within intimate social networks, negative correlations between political heterogeneity and electoral participation are unlikely to result from political disagreement

The role of partisan cues in voter mobilization campaigns: evidence from a randomized field experiment

The transmission of partisan appeals during election campaigns is widely believed to aid the formation of citizens' candidate preferences, or to serve as rallying cries, thereby increasing turnout. While laboratory and survey experiments show that partisan cues help citizens decide between candidates, and partisan elections see higher turnout than non-partisan elections, it is unclear if party labels and partisan rhetoric cause voters to turn out in higher numbers in real-world elections. We exploit a low-information election in the UK to randomly assign whether campaign phone messages include strong partisan cues or promote the same candidate without such cues. Whereas we find no significant difference in the overall effectiveness of messages with and without partisan cues at increasing turnout, the effectiveness of the former is moderated by party preference: Consistent with the use of acceptance-rejection heuristics, campaign calls with partisan cues are more likely to mobilize party supporters than rival partisans

Probability-free pricing of adjusted American lookbacks

Consider an American option that pays G(X^*_t) when exercised at time t, where G is a positive increasing function, X^*_t := \sup_{s\le t}X_s, and X_s is the price of the underlying security at time s. Assuming zero interest rates, we show that the seller of this option can hedge his position by trading in the underlying security if he begins with initial capital X_0\int_{X_0}^{\infty}G(x)x^{-2}dx (and this is the smallest initial capital that allows him to hedge his position). This leads to strategies for trading that are always competitive both with a given strategy's current performance and, to a somewhat lesser degree, with its best performance so far. It also leads to methods of statistical testing that avoid sacrificing too much of the maximum statistical significance that they achieve in the course of accumulating data.Comment: 28 pages, 1 figur

Hacking into the emotion-creativity link Two new approaches to interactive systems that influence the relationship between emotion and creativity

Emotions can influence creative thinking. The ability of people to have the emotions that augment creativity can therefore help them to achieve higher creative task performance. How to design interactive systems that can effectively make use of this potential is, however, still an unanswered question. To explore possible answers to this question we have developed two novel approaches to interactive systems that can be used to effectively hack into the emotion-creativity link. One approach we developed enables a system to hack into the function of motor expressions in emotion regulation, in order to regulate the emotions that happen spontaneously during a creative task. We demonstrate that embodied interactions designed based on motor expressions, while used to interact with a system, can influence an intended emotion, and thereby influence the relationship between emotion and creativity. The second approach that we developed enables a system to hack into the cognitive appraisal processes that help cause emotion during a creative task. We demonstrate that believable computer generated feedback about the originality of a user’s own ideas, can be manipulated to help cause an intended emotion, determine its intensity, and thereby also influence the relationship between emotion and creativity. The contribution of this thesis is the development of two novel approaches to interactive systems that aim to influence the emotion-creativity link and in particular the explication of the mechanisms underlying these approaches. The studies form a novel contribution to both interactive systems research and the creativity sciences