The Silver Lining Around Fearful Living
This research addresses how fear influences behavior and creativity, with potential implications for psychology and AI, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing studies of fear and exploration.
The paper investigates how threat and fear affect exploration and creativity, finding that fearful killifish explore new environments more slowly than non-fearful ones, and that threatening stimuli lead to more creative stories.
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.