The Silver Lining Around Fearful Living
Abstract
This paper discusses in layperson's terms human and computational studies of the impact of threat and fear on exploration and creativity. A first study showed that both killifish from a lake with predators and from a lake without predators explore a new environment to the same degree and plotting number of new spaces covered over time generates a hump-shaped curve. However, for the fish from the lake with predators the curve is shifted to the right; they take longer. This pattern was replicated by a computer model of exploratory behavior varying only one parameter, the fear parameter. A second study showed that stories inspired by threatening photographs were rated as more creative than stories inspired by non-threatening photographs. Various explanations for the findings are discussed.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1502.02193,
title = {The Silver Lining Around Fearful Living},
author = {Liane Gabora},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.02193},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
4 pages, Psychology Today (online). https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mindbloggling/201502/the-silver-lining-around-fearful-living-0 (2015)