About the Team
This research is being carried out as a part of the doctoral research project titled: Inspiration in Daily Life: How Does Inspiration Relate to Creativity and Well-Being? in the Department of Psychology at The Graduate Center and Brooklyn College, City University of New York.
PRIMARY RESEARCHER:Kaile Smith, M.Sc., Ph.D. Student
Kaile Smith is a doctoral researcher in the Cognitive and Comparative Psychology Department at The Graduate Center, the City University of New York. She holds a master’s degree in the Psychology of the Arts, Neuroaesthetics & Creativity from Goldsmiths, University of London. Previous to pursuing her interests in the psychology of creativity, she spent 15 years living and working in New York City as a designer and creative director. She completed her BFA in Communication Design at Parsons the New School for Design.
Kaile is curious about the complex relationships between creativity, emotions, identity, motivation, and well-being. She is passionate about integrating her psychological research with her real-world experience working in creative industries, managing creative teams, and first-hand knowledge of the pressures placed on creatives in their work and everyday lives. She joins Rollo May in asking… “what if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?”
PRIMARY RESEARCH SUPERVISOR:Dr. Jennifer Drake, Ph.D
Jennifer Drake is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology with a minor in Statistics from Boston College in 2012.
Her research program focuses on the psychology of the arts. In one line of research, she examines the emotion regulation strategies in children and adults, examining the relative advantages of expression vs. distraction. In a second line of research, she studies cognitive and perceptual processes underlying graphic representation skills in autistic, non-autistic, and gifted children in order to understand the development of superior perceptual abilities in relation to basic cognition. She also studies children's and adult's responses to and understanding of works of art.
RESEARCH SUPERVISOR:Dr. Aaron Kozbelt, Ph.D
Aaron Kozbelt's research program, focusing on creativity and cognition in the arts, derives largely from his outside interests. In addition to his training in psychology, he has spent more than 20 years as a practicing visual artist, and his initial research forays grew directly out of his experiences as an artist. Kozbelt has also incorporated his long-standing interest in classical music into a line of archival research examining patterns of creativity over the lifespan of classical composers. More recently, he has started research on creative cognition, humor production and sexual selection, and metacognition and evaluation in creative problem-solving.
Psychology Department
The Graduate Center,
The City University of New York
365 5th Ave
New York, NY 10016
United States