Alexander P Christensen
Biographic Data
| ID | 2749418 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alexander P Christensen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alexander P |
| FAMILY NAME | Christensen |
| SIGNATURE | CHRISTENSEN A P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Vanderbilt University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9798-7037 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 5 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 29 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Artists’ morality colors aesthetic judgments of their paintings
Can art promote understanding? A review of the psychology and neuroscience of aesthetic cognitivism
Aesthetic cognitivism refers to the proposition that art promotes knowledge and understanding.Despite its intuitive appeal, few empirical investigations have tested the validity of this philosophical claim.In our review, we outline prior arguments for and against aesthetic cognitivism.Then, with a focus on visual art, we discuss how empirical aesthetics and neuroscience can contribute to conversations about aesthetic cognitivism.We propose that e…
Toward a Psychology of Individuals
In the last half of the twentieth century, psychology and neuroscience have experienced a renewed interest in intraindividual variation. To date, there are few quantitative methods to evaluate whether a population (between-person) structure is likely to hold for individual people, often referred to as ergodicity. We introduce a new network information theoretic metric, the ergodicity information index (EII), that quantifies the amount of informat…
A Systematic Evaluation of Wording Effects Modeling Under the Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling Framework
Wording effects, the systematic method variance arising from the inconsistent responding to positively and negatively worded items of the same construct, are pervasive in the behavioral and health sciences. Although several factor modeling strategies have been proposed to mitigate their adverse effects, there is limited systematic research assessing their performance with exploratory structural equation models (ESEM). The present study evaluated …
Exploring Estimation Procedures for Reducing Dimensionality in Psychological Network Modeling
To understand psychological data, it is crucial to examine the structure and dimensions of variables. In this study, we examined alternative estimation algorithms to the conventional GLASSO-based exploratory graph analysis (EGA) in network psychometric models to assess the dimensionality structure of the data. The study applied Bayesian conjugate or Jeffreys' priors to estimate the graphical structure and then used the Louvain community detection…
Developmental changes in youth affect
The transition from childhood to adolescence is a period of social-emotional reorganization involving changes in affect. Most research has examined developmental changes in between-person affect. Few studies have investigated developmental changes in associations between individual emotions and the structure of affective experience in youth across developmental age. This study used exploratory graph analysis to assess developmental changes in emo…
‘To be avoided by every correct Writer’
Robert Baker is generally acknowledged to have written the first English usage guide in 1770, but in 1752, George Harris published a short pamphlet called Observations upon the English Language in a Letter to Friend that shares many features of a usage guide. Though smaller than Baker’s book, Harris’s pamphlet nonetheless collects some 66–126 usage items (depending on how one counts categories and instances) and pronounces his preference for one …
Creativity
The present study explored the public conceptualization of creativity on Twitter through co-listed hashtags associated with #creativity in a million tweets. Exploratory Graph Analysis was used to identify a network of semantic clusters, and a pre-trained language model yielded the sentiment of the underlying tweets. The semantic clusters reflect well-known everyday creative domains focused on visual and digital arts, storytelling, and handicraft.…
Why does Creativity Foster Well-Being? Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness during Everyday Creative Activities
Does the frame of an artwork matter? Cultural framing and aesthetic judgments for abstract and representational art
Measuring art knowledge
The Aesthetic Fluency Scale is a commonly used measure of people's art knowledge.This scale was initially developed for museum visitors, but its usage has expanded to other populations, including non-arts students.The present research used an Item Response Theory approach to better understand the scale's functioning in two samples-artistically engaged individuals (i.e., museum visitors and art students) and non-arts students-and any differences i…
Mapping the Creative Personality
Existing research has consistently supported a relationship between creative achievement and specific personality traits (e.g. openness to experience). However, such work has largely focused on univariate associations, potentially obscuring complex interactions among multiple personality factors, rendering an incomplete picture of the creative personality. We applied a psychometric network approach to characterize the multidimensional personality…
Imagination as a Facet of Openness/Intellect
Previous research has investigated the nature of imagination as a construct related to multiple forms of higher-order cognition. Despite the emergence of various conceptualizations of imagination, few attempts have been made to explore the structure of imagination as a trait in the context of existing hierarchically-nested personality dimensions. We present the Dual Facet Imagination Scale (DFIS) for measuring trait imagination that distinguishes…
Creative Omnivores
Studies of everyday creativity suggest that some people are like creative omnivores, dabbling in a broad range of creative pursuits, but others are like picky eaters, focusing on a single creative passion. A week-long experience sampling study examined the breadth vs depth of 125 university students’ everyday creative activities. Several times a day, people were asked if they were doing something creative, and if they were, to describe what they …
Back to the basics
Researchers have invested a great deal in creating reliable, “gold-standard” creativity assessments that can be administered in controlled laboratory settings, though these efforts have come at the cost of not using ecologically and face-valid tasks. To help fill this critical gap, we developed and implemented a novel, face-valid paradigm that required participants to paint abstract pieces of art, which were later rated for creative quality. We f…
Unique Variable Analysis
The local independence assumption states that variables are unrelated after conditioning on a latent variable. Common problems that arise from violations of this assumption include model misspecification, biased model parameters, and inaccurate estimates of internal structure. These problems are not limited to latent variable models but also apply to network psychometrics. This paper proposes a novel network psychometric approach to detect locall…
Friends as a language learning resource in multilingual primary school classrooms
Interactions with classroom friends may be an important contributor to first and second language development, but to date this hypothesis has not been tested. Using a longitudinal design, the current study investigated the relationship between classroom friendships and oral language development in children. In 8 classrooms, we assessed the relationship between oral language skills and classroom social networks. Across the classrooms, 165 primary …
What kind of impacts can artwork have on viewers? Establishing a taxonomy for aesthetic impacts
What kinds of impacts can visual art have on a viewer? To identify potential art impacts, we recruited five aesthetics experts from different academic disciplines: art history, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology and theology. Together, the group curated a set of terms that corresponded to descriptive features (124 terms) and cognitive-affective impacts (69 terms) of artworks. Using these terms as prompts, participants (n = 899) were given one m…
Neural Representations of Conceptual Fixation during Creative Imagination
A large body of research has revealed that viewing example image stimuli tends to constrain creative idea generation. However, the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying such visual fixation in creative cognition are unclear. In the present experiment, we explored whether example images impacted creative imagination and patterns of neural activity within brain regions associated with visual object recognition. Participants first viewed example imag…
Estimating the Stability of Psychological Dimensions via Bootstrap Exploratory Graph Analysis
Exploratory Graph Analysis (EGA) has emerged as a popular approach for estimating the dimensionality of multivariate data using psychometric networks. Sampling variability, however, has made reproducibility and generalizability a key issue in network psychometrics. To address this issue, we have developed a novel bootstrap approach called Bootstrap Exploratory Graph Analysis (bootEGA). bootEGA generates a sampling distribution of EGA results wher…
Seeing outside the box
Quantifying the if, the when, and the what of the sublime
Sublime encounters provide a compelling example of the peaks of our shared emotional and cognitive experiences. For centuries, these have been a target for philosophy and, more recently, for psychology, with its renewed focus on profound or aesthetic events. The sublime has been theoretically connected to multiple contexts, from interactions with overpowering nature, to beauty, music, even interpersonal engagements, and to multiple emotions—dange…
Keeping Creativity under Control
Increasing research efforts are focused on explaining the cognitive bases of creativity. However, it remains unclear when and how cognitive factors such as intelligence and executive function uniquely contribute to performance on creative thinking tasks. Although a relationship between fluid intelligence (Gf) and creative cognition has been well-documented, the underlying mechanism of this relation is unknown. Here, we test one possible mechanism…
Entropy Fit Indices
The accurate identification of the content and number of latent factors underlying multivariate data is an important endeavor in many areas of Psychology and related fields. Recently, a new dimensionality assessment technique based on network psychometrics was proposed (Exploratory Graph Analysis, EGA), but a measure to check the fit of the dimensionality structure to the data estimated via EGA is still lacking. Although traditional factor-analyt…
If you’re funny and you know it
Why does Creativity Foster Well-Being? Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness during Everyday Creative Activities
Friends as a language learning resource in multilingual primary school classrooms
Interactions with classroom friends may be an important contributor to first and second language development, but to date this hypothesis has not been tested. Using a longitudinal design, the current study investigated the relationship between classroom friendships and oral language development in children. In 8 classrooms, we assessed the relationship between oral language skills and classroom social networks. Across the classrooms, 165 primary …
What kind of impacts can artwork have on viewers? Establishing a taxonomy for aesthetic impacts
What kinds of impacts can visual art have on a viewer? To identify potential art impacts, we recruited five aesthetics experts from different academic disciplines: art history, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology and theology. Together, the group curated a set of terms that corresponded to descriptive features (124 terms) and cognitive-affective impacts (69 terms) of artworks. Using these terms as prompts, participants (n = 899) were given one m…
If you’re funny and you know it
Commentary
A major question for research on the development of creativity is whether it is interested in creative potential (a prospective approach that uses measures early in life to predict adult creativity) or in children's creativity for its own sake. We suggest that a focus on potential for future creativity diminishes the fascinating creative world of childhood. The contributions to this issue can be organized in light of an ability × motivation frame…
Robust prediction of individual creative ability from brain functional connectivity
Significance People’s capacity to generate creative ideas is central to technological and cultural progress. Despite advances in the neuroscience of creativity, the field lacks clarity on whether a specific neural architecture distinguishes the highly creative brain. Using methods in network neuroscience, we modeled individual creative thinking ability as a function of variation in whole-brain functional connectivity. We identified a brain networ…
Investigating the performance of exploratory graph analysis and traditional techniques to identify the number of latent factors
Exploratory graph analysis (EGA) is a new technique that was recently proposed within the framework of network psychometrics to estimate the number of factors underlying multivariate data. Unlike other methods, EGA produces a visual guide-network plot-that not only indicates the number of dimensions to retain, but also which items cluster together and their level of association. Although previous studies have found EGA to be superior to tradition…
Associations between symptoms of problematic smartphone, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram use
Estimating the Stability of Psychological Dimensions via Bootstrap Exploratory Graph Analysis
Exploratory Graph Analysis (EGA) has emerged as a popular approach for estimating the dimensionality of multivariate data using psychometric networks. Sampling variability, however, has made reproducibility and generalizability a key issue in network psychometrics. To address this issue, we have developed a novel bootstrap approach called Bootstrap Exploratory Graph Analysis (bootEGA). bootEGA generates a sampling distribution of EGA results wher…
Seeing outside the box
Quantifying the if, the when, and the what of the sublime
Sublime encounters provide a compelling example of the peaks of our shared emotional and cognitive experiences. For centuries, these have been a target for philosophy and, more recently, for psychology, with its renewed focus on profound or aesthetic events. The sublime has been theoretically connected to multiple contexts, from interactions with overpowering nature, to beauty, music, even interpersonal engagements, and to multiple emotions—dange…
Keeping Creativity under Control
Increasing research efforts are focused on explaining the cognitive bases of creativity. However, it remains unclear when and how cognitive factors such as intelligence and executive function uniquely contribute to performance on creative thinking tasks. Although a relationship between fluid intelligence (Gf) and creative cognition has been well-documented, the underlying mechanism of this relation is unknown. Here, we test one possible mechanism…
Entropy Fit Indices
The accurate identification of the content and number of latent factors underlying multivariate data is an important endeavor in many areas of Psychology and related fields. Recently, a new dimensionality assessment technique based on network psychometrics was proposed (Exploratory Graph Analysis, EGA), but a measure to check the fit of the dimensionality structure to the data estimated via EGA is still lacking. Although traditional factor-analyt…
If you’re funny and you know it
Neural Representations of Conceptual Fixation during Creative Imagination
A large body of research has revealed that viewing example image stimuli tends to constrain creative idea generation. However, the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying such visual fixation in creative cognition are unclear. In the present experiment, we explored whether example images impacted creative imagination and patterns of neural activity within brain regions associated with visual object recognition. Participants first viewed example imag…
Does the frame of an artwork matter? Cultural framing and aesthetic judgments for abstract and representational art
Measuring art knowledge
The Aesthetic Fluency Scale is a commonly used measure of people's art knowledge.This scale was initially developed for museum visitors, but its usage has expanded to other populations, including non-arts students.The present research used an Item Response Theory approach to better understand the scale's functioning in two samples-artistically engaged individuals (i.e., museum visitors and art students) and non-arts students-and any differences i…
Mapping the Creative Personality
Existing research has consistently supported a relationship between creative achievement and specific personality traits (e.g. openness to experience). However, such work has largely focused on univariate associations, potentially obscuring complex interactions among multiple personality factors, rendering an incomplete picture of the creative personality. We applied a psychometric network approach to characterize the multidimensional personality…
Imagination as a Facet of Openness/Intellect
Previous research has investigated the nature of imagination as a construct related to multiple forms of higher-order cognition. Despite the emergence of various conceptualizations of imagination, few attempts have been made to explore the structure of imagination as a trait in the context of existing hierarchically-nested personality dimensions. We present the Dual Facet Imagination Scale (DFIS) for measuring trait imagination that distinguishes…
Creative Omnivores
Studies of everyday creativity suggest that some people are like creative omnivores, dabbling in a broad range of creative pursuits, but others are like picky eaters, focusing on a single creative passion. A week-long experience sampling study examined the breadth vs depth of 125 university students’ everyday creative activities. Several times a day, people were asked if they were doing something creative, and if they were, to describe what they …
Back to the basics
Researchers have invested a great deal in creating reliable, “gold-standard” creativity assessments that can be administered in controlled laboratory settings, though these efforts have come at the cost of not using ecologically and face-valid tasks. To help fill this critical gap, we developed and implemented a novel, face-valid paradigm that required participants to paint abstract pieces of art, which were later rated for creative quality. We f…
Unique Variable Analysis
The local independence assumption states that variables are unrelated after conditioning on a latent variable. Common problems that arise from violations of this assumption include model misspecification, biased model parameters, and inaccurate estimates of internal structure. These problems are not limited to latent variable models but also apply to network psychometrics. This paper proposes a novel network psychometric approach to detect locall…
Friends as a language learning resource in multilingual primary school classrooms
Interactions with classroom friends may be an important contributor to first and second language development, but to date this hypothesis has not been tested. Using a longitudinal design, the current study investigated the relationship between classroom friendships and oral language development in children. In 8 classrooms, we assessed the relationship between oral language skills and classroom social networks. Across the classrooms, 165 primary …
What kind of impacts can artwork have on viewers? Establishing a taxonomy for aesthetic impacts
What kinds of impacts can visual art have on a viewer? To identify potential art impacts, we recruited five aesthetics experts from different academic disciplines: art history, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology and theology. Together, the group curated a set of terms that corresponded to descriptive features (124 terms) and cognitive-affective impacts (69 terms) of artworks. Using these terms as prompts, participants (n = 899) were given one m…
‘To be avoided by every correct Writer’
Robert Baker is generally acknowledged to have written the first English usage guide in 1770, but in 1752, George Harris published a short pamphlet called Observations upon the English Language in a Letter to Friend that shares many features of a usage guide. Though smaller than Baker’s book, Harris’s pamphlet nonetheless collects some 66–126 usage items (depending on how one counts categories and instances) and pronounces his preference for one …
Creativity
The present study explored the public conceptualization of creativity on Twitter through co-listed hashtags associated with #creativity in a million tweets. Exploratory Graph Analysis was used to identify a network of semantic clusters, and a pre-trained language model yielded the sentiment of the underlying tweets. The semantic clusters reflect well-known everyday creative domains focused on visual and digital arts, storytelling, and handicraft.…
Why does Creativity Foster Well-Being? Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness during Everyday Creative Activities
Can art promote understanding? A review of the psychology and neuroscience of aesthetic cognitivism
Aesthetic cognitivism refers to the proposition that art promotes knowledge and understanding.Despite its intuitive appeal, few empirical investigations have tested the validity of this philosophical claim.In our review, we outline prior arguments for and against aesthetic cognitivism.Then, with a focus on visual art, we discuss how empirical aesthetics and neuroscience can contribute to conversations about aesthetic cognitivism.We propose that e…
Toward a Psychology of Individuals
In the last half of the twentieth century, psychology and neuroscience have experienced a renewed interest in intraindividual variation. To date, there are few quantitative methods to evaluate whether a population (between-person) structure is likely to hold for individual people, often referred to as ergodicity. We introduce a new network information theoretic metric, the ergodicity information index (EII), that quantifies the amount of informat…
Psychology (22 works) · Computer Science (16 works) · Creativity in Education and Neuroscience (16 works) · Social Psychology (12 works) · Cognitive psychology (10 works) · Aesthetic Perception and Analysis (9 works) · Creativity (9 works) · Mental Health Research Topics (9 works) · Artificial Intelligence (8 works) · Statistics (8 works)