e27 SPECIAL EVENT— What Makes a Poem Creative?: The Science of Poetry with Dr. Soma Chaudhuri
Thursday, March 20th, 2025
18:30-20:00 GMT (London, UK) • 1:30-3:00pm EST (North America, Eastern)
Join us for a special edition of the Creative Minds Reading Club on Wednesday, March 20th.
This session, “What Makes a Poem Creative?: The Science of Poetry,” will feature an inspiring presentation, and we are delighted to welcome a special guest:
🔬 Dr. Soma Chaudhuri
Dr. Soma Chaudhuri is a researcher in experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience, with a PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London, under the supervision of Prof. Joydeep Bhattacharya. Her research explores the neurocognitive mechanisms of creativity and aesthetic judgments in literary art, particularly poetry, using behavioral, neuroscientific, and computational approaches. She also explores how expertise and personality traits shape readers’ aesthetic judgments.
🔗 Find out more about Soma work here: Website | Publications
With Dr. Soma Chaudhuri, we will discuss how readers evaluate poetic creativity based on subjective qualities and psychological traits, and explore how expertise influences these judgments of “what makes a poem creative?”
This meeting has passed, but we would love for you to join us next time!
📄 Chaudhuri, Dooley, Johnson, Beaty & Bhattacharya (2024)
Evaluation of Poetic Creativity: Predictors and the Role of Expertise—A Multilevel Approach. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000649
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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: clarity, aesthetic appeal, felt valence, felt arousal, surprise, and overall creativity. Linear multilevel analysis showed that aesthetic appeal was the strongest predictor of poetic creativity, followed by surprise and felt valence. Multilevel mediation analysis indicated significant mediation by surprise and felt valence on the relationship between aesthetic appeal and creativity at both within and between-participant levels. Further, expertise in English literature was found to significantly moderate the effects of all three predictors on the evaluation of creativity. The study simultaneously captured the surprise-evoking line(s). Using the semantic distance computing approach, we have shown the objective validation of the subjectively chosen line(s) of surprise. Altogether, our findings suggest a parsimonious model of evaluation of creativity of poems and its interaction with expertise.
👋🏼 Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you need a pdf of the article.