FREUDIAN SYMBOLS ON SEXUAL AND CREATIVE ASPECTS OF STORIES

Sexual content and creativity of stories and story titles was investig ated. 96 college students responded to visual presentation of instance s of theoretical Freudian symbols. Analyses subjected responses to a 2 (sex)x 2 (symbol)x 2 (mode)x 6 (subscales) analysis of variance with repeated measures on subscales and to multivariate analysis of varianc e procedures with four dependent measures. These showed men wrote masc uline stories and women wrote feminine stories. Certain subscales were more sensitive to sexual content than others. Pairwise comparisons be tween the subscales among instances of symbols emerged as significant. In addition, subjects exposed to Male symbols wrote stories containin g greater latent sexual content than subjects exposed to Female symbol s. Creativity of story titles was evident only on a univariate analysi s of variance.