Hemispheric activity during creative thinking: role of gender factor

Creative thinking was studied by psychometric and electrophysiological methods in men and women, taking into account their social stereotypes of behavior. The verbal and figural creativity was measured in university students of technical and humanitarian departments under control of intelligence scores and masculine-feminine psychological traits. The sex differences in figural creativity were obtained with higher index of originality in men. These differences can be reduced by the changing of social roles: when women choose occupations, which have greater male's features. Another factor of a weakening of sex differences during performance of figural creative task was high level of female intelligence. The reliable differences between men and women in verbal creativity testing by performance of remote associates task are not obtained. The discriminate criterion of effective divergent thinking showed higher scores for both masculinity and femininity in persons. A hemispheric interaction associated with performance of convergent and divergent verbal tasks and masculine-feminine psychological traits in men and women was analyzed by using the power and coherence of cortex electrical activity in 4-30 Hz range. No significant gender differences in originality of associations were also revealed, however, gender-related differences in a regional dynamic of the beta2-power were found during verbal creative thinking by comparing the final and initial stages of the remote associates task. Successful search of original word - associates vs. a generation of standard words - is accompanied by local increase of interhemispheric coherence of beta2 rhythm mostly in the parietotemporal cortex. At that, for an organization of neuronal assembles requiring to a research of original words, creative man had an increase of hemispheric interaction focused in frontal and temporal loci of the right hemisphere and in the left occipital locus and for women in the left frontal and temporal regions. Creative men differed from noncreative ones by greater values of inter- and intrahemispheric coherence and were similar by hemispheric interaction with women. Hemispheric interaction among the rest was associated with ratio of masculinity and femininity correlated to coherence patterns mostly in the left hemisphere. It is suggested that the verbal creative thinking in men is based on "insight" strategy whereas women additionally involve the "intellectual" strategy. Gender social stereotypes have a great extent of influence on rational function of the left hemisphere and, correspondingly, on creative processes in a brain.