Research is currently witnessing more investigations into malevolent creativity—creativity that is used to intentionally harm others. Inspired by previous methods to measure malevolent creativity, in the present study, we introduce a real‐world behavioral task designed to capture individuals’ capacity for using creativity for the purpose of attaining malevolent goals in response to everyday, provocative situations. In a sample of 105 students, we found malevolent creativity positively correlated with fluency in conventional creative ideation, as well as with self‐reported typical malevolent creativity behavior in daily life. Moreover, performance on the malevolent creativity task showed positive correlations with the maladaptive personality trait of antagonism (PID‐5) as well as individuals’ state anger at the beginning of the experiment. Further, our multiple regression analysis revealed that conventional creative ideation, antagonistic personality, and state anger all explained unique, non‐overlapping variance in the capacity for implementing malevolent creativity. As a whole, these findings suggest that different cognitive and affective factors, along with specific personality traits may each contribute to the expression of malevolent creativity in distinct ways. Future investigations striving to further decode the destructive potential of individuals toward others may benefit from this validated behavioral measurement approach to malevolent creativity.

This study investigated task-related changes of EEG alpha power while participants were imagining creative moves in soccer decision-making situations. After presenting brief video clips of a soccer scene, participants had to imagine themselves as the acting player and to think either of a creative/original or an obvious/conventional move (control condition) that might lead to a goal. Performance of the soccer task generally elicited comparatively strong alpha power decreases at parietal and occipital sites, indicating high visuospatial processing demands. This power decrease was less pronounced in the creative vs. control condition, reflecting a more internally oriented state of information processing characterized by more imaginative mental simulation rather than stimulus-driven bottom-up processing. In addition, more creative task performance in the soccer task was associated with stronger alpha desynchronization at left cortical sites, most prominently over motor related areas. This finding suggests that individuals who generated more creative moves were more intensively engaged in processes related to movement imagery. Unlike the domain-specific creativity measure, individual's trait creative potential, as assessed by a psychometric creativity test, was globally positively associated with alpha power at all cortical sites. In investigating creative processes implicated in complex creative behavior involving more ecologically valid demands, this study showed that thinking creatively in soccer decision-making situations recruits specific brain networks supporting processes related to visuospatial attention and movement imagery, while the relative increase in alpha power in more creative conditions and in individuals with higher creative potential might reflect a pattern relevant across different creativity domains.

Although there exists increasing knowledge about brain correlates underlying creative ideation in general, the specific neurocognitive mechanisms implicate

The capacity to find humorous perspectives in aversive situations may outline a helpful strategy in the context of cognitive reappraisal. Yet, research suggested that some people produce more adaptive humour than others. At the same time, not all forms of cognitive reinterpretation seem to be unequivocally beneficial. The present study aimed to investigate specific cognitive reappraisal strategies that individuals employ in humorous reappraisal of adverse events. In a sample of 95 participants, the use of cognitive reappraisal sub-strategies was assessed in a behavioural test in which participants were required to generate a series of humorous reappraisals of self-relevant, threatening events. These reappraisal sub-strategies (three positive reinterpretation strategies, three de-emphasising strategies) were then related to the habitual use of different kinds of humour as well as the broader DSM-5 personality trait domains and well-being in terms of depressive experiences, assessed by self-report questionnaires. While no robust relationships were found for reappraisal strategies based on de-emphasising, sub-strategies within the positive reinterpretation category showed specific and contrasting associations with the examined traits. Findings indicated that the ability to produce humour is only linked to a favourable pattern of reappraisal strategies when manifested in benign forms of humour. Specific relations also emerged for the broader personality traits. The study suggests that some characteristics that advance the use of benign humour also benefit adaptive emotion regulation. The opposite seems to be true for malicious, or "dark" humour. The introduced behavioural approach to the analysis of humorous cognitive reappraisal may prove useful also in future related research.