Freudian symbols on sexual and creative aspects of stories

Sexual content and creativity of stories and story titles was investigated. 96 college students responded to visual presentation of instances 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 variance procedures with four dependent measures. These showed men wrote masculine stories and women wrote feminine stories. Certain subscales were more sensitive to sexual content than others. Pairwise comparisons between the subscales among instances of symbols emerged as significant. In addition, subjects exposed to Male symbols wrote stories containing greater latent sexual content than subjects exposed to Female symbols. Creativity of story titles was evident only on a univariate analysis of variance.