Dorothy Miell

Creativity and Music Education: The Impact of Social Variables

Recent publications within the psychology of music and music education have begun to highlight the importance that social factors have for a childs developing musicality, but there is still much to understand about this influence. This paper highlights two projects that investigated aspects of the intrinsically social nature of musical participation. One study investigated the communication (both verbal and musical) taking place during compositions created by friends and non-friends. The second study investigated the musical and communication gains made by individuals with special needs who attended Gamelan workshops. The educational implications of these studies are considered, as are directions for future research.

Status and Mating Success Amongst Visual Artists

Geoffrey Miller has hypothesized that producing artwork functions as a mating display. Here we investigate the relationship between mating success and artistic success in a sample of 236 visual artists. Initially, we derived a measure of artistic success that covered a broad range of artistic behaviors and beliefs. As predicted by Miller’s evolutionary theory, more successful male artists had more sexual partners than less successful artists but this did not hold for female artists. Also, male artists with greater artistic success had a mating strategy based on longer term relationships. Overall the results provide partial support for the sexual selection hypothesis for the function of visual art.