Exploring the Relationship Between Benign Masochism and Creativity

Voiceover

Presenter(s)

Alexander Scheetz, Julia Weber

Abstract or Description

Benign masochism is the idea that people gain satisfaction from inherently unpleasurable experiences, such as sad movies, massage pain, and spicy food. This idea was originally presented by Paul Rozin who developed a Benign Masochism scale. The survey presents participants with a number of experiences and asks to rate them. Little is known about the individual factors that predict differences in benign masochism. The current study looks at the relationship between benign masochism and creativity. Participants will complete the Divergent Association Task (DAT) to measure their creativity, and the benign masochism scale adapted from Rozin (2013). In the current study, the benign masochism scale consists of a list of 38 randomly presented experiences. Each will contain a scale from 0 to 10 regarding the level of satisfaction or enjoyment the participant receives from the listed item or behavior, with 0 being “not at all” and 10 being “as much as I like anything.” Individual scores for each participant will be averaged to obtain an overall estimate of the person’s preferences. This average will be correlated to their creativity score to better understand the relationship between creativity and benign masochism. We predict that individuals with high creativity will be more likely to enjoy experiences of benign masochism. Creativity is linked to several common “antisocial” personality traits like dishonesty. Exploring how creativity relates to benign masochism can further our understanding for how so-called positive and negative character traits interact. 

Mentor

Alexander Kranjec