Dan R Johnson
Biographic Data
| ID | 6097580 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dan R Johnson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dan R |
| FAMILY NAME | Johnson |
| SIGNATURE | JOHNSON D R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Washington and Lee University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8312-6191 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 14 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Automated assessment of creativity in multilingual narratives
Researchers and educators interested in creative writing need a reliable and efficient tool to score the creativity of narratives, such as short stories. Typically, human raters manually assess narrative creativity, but such subjective scoring is limited by labor costs and rater disagreement. Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable success on creativity tasks, yet they have not been applied to scoring narratives, including multilingual…
One piece of the puzzle
We describe the process undertaken by a six-person faculty committee at Washington and Lee University to develop an open-ended empirically informed student evaluation of teaching (SET) and a process to guide interpretation of SET results. Our work focused on (1) Identifying empirically based principles and resources to guide SET development; (2) Developing and pilot-testing a new SET instrument; and (3) Creating a process for faculty and departme…
Thematic profile analysis reveals the explanatory power of themes in creative ideas
Evaluation of poetic creativity
Poetry is one of the most creative expressions of language, but how we evaluate the creativity of a poem is not properly characterized. The present study investigated the role of various subjective qualities – clarity, aesthetic appeal, felt valence, arousal, and surprise – in predicting the creativity judgment of English poems. Participants (N=129) were presented with a broad range of English poems; they rated each poem on six characteristics: c…
Identifying the functional relationships between creativity and its constituents
International audience
Multilingual semantic distance
Creativity research commonly involves recruiting human raters to judge the originality of responses to divergent thinking tasks, such as the alternate uses task (AUT). These manual scoring practices have benefited the field, but they also have limitations, including labor-intensiveness and subjectivity, which can adversely impact the reliability and validity of assessments. To address these challenges, researchers are increasingly employing autom…
Semantic Distance and the Alternate Uses Task
Semantic distance is increasingly used for automated scoring of originality on divergent thinking tasks, such as the Alternate Uses Task (AUT). Despite some psychometric support for semantic distance – including positive correlations with human creativity ratings – additional work is needed to optimize its reliability and validity, including identifying maximally reliable items (objects) for AUT administration. We identify a set of 13 AUT items b…
Semantic Context Search in Creative Idea Generation
The ability to search memory for diverse contextual usages of words is proposed to play a role in creative idea generation. However, it is not yet known whether searching for more diverse contextual usages of words enhances the novelty of ideas during idea generation. In three experiments, participants were given a noun as a creativity prompt (e.g., chamber) and generated words creatively linked to the prompt (e.g., secret, relic). We directly ma…
Automating creativity assessment with SemDis
Creativity research requires assessing the quality of ideas and products. In practice, conducting creativity research often involves asking several human raters to judge participants’ responses to creativity tasks, such as judging the novelty of ideas from the alternate uses task (AUT). Although such subjective scoring methods have proved useful, they have two inherent limitations—labor cost (raters typically code thousands of responses) and subj…
The neglect of idea diversity in creative idea generation and evaluation
Improving Skeptics' Reasoning When Evaluating Climate Change Material
A sizeable portion of populations around the world deny that humans are responsible for climate change despite scientific consensus to the contrary. Decades of psychological theory and research point to people's biased evaluation of information as an underlying mechanism that maintains or further polarizes beliefs. The current studies offer a novel cognitive approach to combat biased evaluation. Asking climate change skeptics to focus on how well…
Transportation into a story increases empathy, prosocial behavior, and perceptual bias toward fearful expressions
Emotional attention set-shifting and its relationship to anxiety and emotion regulation
Attentional deployment is a primary strategy individuals use to regulate emotion. In 2 experiments, a measure of an individual's ability to deploy attention toward and away from emotional mental representations was developed. This measure of attentional control capacity for emotion adapted an explicit-cuing task switching paradigm in which participants had to shift between emotional and neutral mental sets. Experiment 1 (N = 118) showed that thos…
Goal-directed attentional deployment to emotional faces and individual differences in emotional regulation
Emotional attention set-shifting and its relationship to anxiety and emotion regulation
Attentional deployment is a primary strategy individuals use to regulate emotion. In 2 experiments, a measure of an individual's ability to deploy attention toward and away from emotional mental representations was developed. This measure of attentional control capacity for emotion adapted an explicit-cuing task switching paradigm in which participants had to shift between emotional and neutral mental sets. Experiment 1 (N = 118) showed that thos…
Goal-directed attentional deployment to emotional faces and individual differences in emotional regulation
Transportation into a story increases empathy, prosocial behavior, and perceptual bias toward fearful expressions
Improving Skeptics' Reasoning When Evaluating Climate Change Material
A sizeable portion of populations around the world deny that humans are responsible for climate change despite scientific consensus to the contrary. Decades of psychological theory and research point to people's biased evaluation of information as an underlying mechanism that maintains or further polarizes beliefs. The current studies offer a novel cognitive approach to combat biased evaluation. Asking climate change skeptics to focus on how well…
Automating creativity assessment with SemDis
Creativity research requires assessing the quality of ideas and products. In practice, conducting creativity research often involves asking several human raters to judge participants’ responses to creativity tasks, such as judging the novelty of ideas from the alternate uses task (AUT). Although such subjective scoring methods have proved useful, they have two inherent limitations—labor cost (raters typically code thousands of responses) and subj…
The neglect of idea diversity in creative idea generation and evaluation
Semantic Distance and the Alternate Uses Task
Semantic distance is increasingly used for automated scoring of originality on divergent thinking tasks, such as the Alternate Uses Task (AUT). Despite some psychometric support for semantic distance – including positive correlations with human creativity ratings – additional work is needed to optimize its reliability and validity, including identifying maximally reliable items (objects) for AUT administration. We identify a set of 13 AUT items b…
Semantic Context Search in Creative Idea Generation
The ability to search memory for diverse contextual usages of words is proposed to play a role in creative idea generation. However, it is not yet known whether searching for more diverse contextual usages of words enhances the novelty of ideas during idea generation. In three experiments, participants were given a noun as a creativity prompt (e.g., chamber) and generated words creatively linked to the prompt (e.g., secret, relic). We directly ma…
Multilingual semantic distance
Creativity research commonly involves recruiting human raters to judge the originality of responses to divergent thinking tasks, such as the alternate uses task (AUT). These manual scoring practices have benefited the field, but they also have limitations, including labor-intensiveness and subjectivity, which can adversely impact the reliability and validity of assessments. To address these challenges, researchers are increasingly employing autom…
One piece of the puzzle
We describe the process undertaken by a six-person faculty committee at Washington and Lee University to develop an open-ended empirically informed student evaluation of teaching (SET) and a process to guide interpretation of SET results. Our work focused on (1) Identifying empirically based principles and resources to guide SET development; (2) Developing and pilot-testing a new SET instrument; and (3) Creating a process for faculty and departme…
Thematic profile analysis reveals the explanatory power of themes in creative ideas
Evaluation of poetic creativity
Poetry is one of the most creative expressions of language, but how we evaluate the creativity of a poem is not properly characterized. The present study investigated the role of various subjective qualities – clarity, aesthetic appeal, felt valence, arousal, and surprise – in predicting the creativity judgment of English poems. Participants (N=129) were presented with a broad range of English poems; they rated each poem on six characteristics: c…
Identifying the functional relationships between creativity and its constituents
International audience
Automated assessment of creativity in multilingual narratives
Researchers and educators interested in creative writing need a reliable and efficient tool to score the creativity of narratives, such as short stories. Typically, human raters manually assess narrative creativity, but such subjective scoring is limited by labor costs and rater disagreement. Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable success on creativity tasks, yet they have not been applied to scoring narratives, including multilingual…
Psychology (12 works) · Cognitive psychology (11 works) · Social Psychology (10 works) · Creativity (9 works) · Creativity in Education and Neuroscience (8 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Cognition (4 works) · Natural language processing (4 works) · Cognitive science (3 works) · Developmental psychology (3 works)