Inspired by art: Higher aesthetic appeal elicits increased felt inspiration in a creative writing task
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Moments of creative inspiration – an evoked state of motivation for creative activity – form a distinct step in creative processes. We hypothesize that the psychological state of being creatively inspired is similar to the state of being aesthetically moved, and that aesthetically moving experiences can serve as prompts for creative inspiration. In Experiment 1, 25 participants wrote 12 short creative texts (repeated measures) in response to “aesthetic” prompts (visual artworks they rated highly aesthetically moving) or “non-aesthetic” prompts (triads of unrelated words). People then rated how inspired they had felt during idea generation. Ratings of felt inspiration were significantly higher for aesthetic vs. non-aesthetic prompts. In Experiment 2, 34 participants performed the same task with prompts consisting of highly-moving, non-moving, or novel artworks they didn’t rate in advance. While pre-exposure to the stimuli had no significant effect, felt inspiration was significantly higher for moving vs. non-moving prompts, and post-test aesthetic ratings of novel artworks were positively correlated with felt inspiration. Furthermore, inspiration ratings correlated positively with the amount of produced text. Being aesthetically moved increases the likelihood of creative inspiration, a finding with implications both for the study of creative and aesthetic processes and also for the potential role of the arts in educational settings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".