Psychology of programming: The role of creativity, empathy and systemizing

In this paper, we started to analyse the impact of individual cognitive processes on early programming learning and performances. In particular, we focused our attention on divergent thinking, creative per-sonality and brain type, analysed within the theoretical framework of the empathizing-systemizing (E-S) Theory. We involved a sample of students in the first year of a bachelor curriculum in Applied Mathematics at the University of Verona. We used this sample to analyse the relations be-tween cognitive styles and programming attitudes and performances. We also explored sex differences, concerning both the level of each measure and these relations.