ABSTRACT
Recent studies have indicated potential links between short bouts of physical activity like stair-climbing and enhanced creative thinking. However, previous research featured limitations, such as using an uncommon 3 flights round-trip design and lacking baseline creative thinking evaluations. To rectify these limitations and build a more comprehensive understanding, the present study adopts a between-subjects pretest posttest comparison design to scrutinize the effects of ascending stair-climbing on both divergent and convergent thinking. 52 subjects underwent a pretest, followed by random assignment to one of four interventions: ascending stair-climbing for 2, 5, or 8 flights, or taking an elevator for 8 flights, before progressing to a posttest. The results revealed a notable improvement in convergent thinking, measured by the increased number of solved matchstick arithmetic problems (d = 1.165), for participants who climbed 2 flights of stairs compared to those who took the elevator. However, climbing 5 or 8 flights showed no such impact on convergent thinking, and stair-climbing, regardless of the number of flights, did not influence divergent thinking. These findings underscore the utility of brief stair-climbing as an accessible means to enhance convergent thinking in everyday settings, providing a nuanced insight into the relationship between physical activity and creative thinking processes.
Subject(s)
Health Promotion , Stair Climbing , Humans , Creativity , Elevators and Escalators , Exercise , Health Promotion/methodsABSTRACT
Recent computational psychiatric research has dissected decision-making under risk into different underlying cognitive computational constructs and identified disease-specific changes in these constructs. Studies are underway to investigate what kind of behavioral or psychological interventions can restore these cognitive, computational constructs. In our previous study, we showed that reminiscing about positive autobiographical memories reduced risk aversion and affected probability weighting in the opposite direction from that observed in psychiatric disorders. However, in that study, we compared positive versus neutral memory retrieval by using a within-subjects crossover posttest design. Therefore, the change of decision-making from baseline is unclear. Furthermore, we used a hypothetical decision-making task and did not include monetary incentives. We attempt to address these limitations and investigated how reminiscing about positive autobiographical memories influences decision-making under risk using a between-subjects pretest posttest comparison design with performance-contingent monetary incentives. In thirty-eight healthy, young adults, we found that reminiscing about positive memories reinforced the commonly observed inverted S-shaped nonlinear probability weighting (f = 0.345, medium to large in effect size). In contrast, reminiscing about positive memories did not affect risk aversion in general. Given that the change in probability weighting after reminiscing about positive memories is in the opposite direction from that observed in psychiatric disorders, our results indicate that positive autobiographical memory retrieval might be a useful behavioral intervention strategy for amending the altered decision-making under risk in psychiatric diseases.
