Journal of Creative Behavior最新文献

The media we consume may shape our cognition, emotion, and behavior. While violent media effects on aggression have been studied extensively, one popular media genre has escaped scrutiny until now: true crime, featuring real stories of assault, murder, or serial killings. We investigated the idea that the manifold examples of real human violence in true crime may be linked to people's capacity for malevolent creativity—generating creative ideas for harming others. Yet, in two cross-sectional studies, we found only weak to contradictory evidence for this idea. Using multiple regression models, in Study 1 (n = 160), true crime consumption was only linked to higher fluency on a malevolent creativity test (MCT) in individuals high in trait aggression. In Study 2 (n = 307), links of true crime consumption with malevolent creativity were eclipsed by links to fictional horror, other media preference, and depressive affect. Moreover, both studies found that high true crime consumption seemed to mitigate the link between general creativity and malevolent originality. Although further experimental and longitudinal research is needed, true crime may potentially inhibit consumers from applying their creative potential to uniquely harming others, which may suggest prosocial and empathic motives in true crime consumption.

Measures of creative behavior have typically been developed for adults (Biographical Inventory of Creative Behavior [BICB]). Such measures are important for examining the mechanisms of creativity and for understanding how creativity education relates to creative behavior. In Japan, where creativity education has become increasingly emphasized in schools, a scale needs to be developed that can assess creative behavior not only among adults but also among adolescents. Thus, this study developed a Japanese version of the BICB (BICB-J) and examined its measurement properties using the Item Response Theory (IRT) (Study 1). The results demonstrated that multiple BICB items had a high difficulty level and that the BICB-J was extremely difficult for Japanese adults. Differential item and test functioning analyses revealed that the difficulty of the BICB-J items varied by gender and age even when the respondents' traits were the same. Furthermore, this study developed the BICB-J for adolescents by adding items and examining its measurement properties using IRT (Study 2). The results showed that the BICB-J items for adolescents had less difficulty measuring the creative behavior of Japanese adolescents than that of adults. The results are discussed considering previous findings on creative activity among Japanese people.

This study conducted a cross-sectional survey to examine the roles of creative self-efficacy and team creative efficacy in employees' and teams' creative performance in Japanese companies, which culturally emphasize group harmony. In total, 3589 employees and 476 supervisors answered the online surveys. After confirming the creative self-efficacy and team creative efficacy constructs using data on the employee subsample (n = 3231), a distinct subsample of 358 employees working in 119 teams was analyzed using hierarchical linear modeling to assess how individual- and team-level efficacy beliefs are associated with supervisors' ratings of employee and team creativity. The results showed that creative self-efficacy was positively associated with individual creativity at both the within- and the between-group levels. By contrast, team creative efficacy was negatively associated with individual creativity at the within-group level, while its between-group (contextual) effect was small and not significant. These findings suggest that discrepancies in team members' perceptions of team creative efficacy may undermine individual creative performance. Overall, this study illustrates that individual and collective efficacy beliefs have different influences on creativity across levels within teams. This highlights the need to consider creativity as a multilayered social process shaped by both individual efficacy and shared team beliefs.

By positing the centrality of process-oriented definitions of creativity, the article revisits Graham Wallas's The Art of Thought, showing that its legacy extends beyond the canonical four-stage model for the creative process. We first extract from Wallas's book some lesser known details that are proxies of metacognitive and emotional control. Second, we trace a century of theoretical development in models of the creative process, discussing how progress in psychological science enabled the birth of the study of creative cognition. Third, we present a detailed comparison between Wallas and the DA VINCI model, which describes the creative process through five interacting mental states: DAV (drive, attention, volition), information, novelty generation, creativity estimation, and implementation. To account for the dynamic nature of the creative process, this model introduces explicit transition states that mediate state transitions during the process, formalizes inspiration as the deliberate admission of “irrelevant” information that enables escape from dominant ideas, and allows for serendipity via divergent creativity estimation. Finally, we outline implications for modeling the cyber-creative process in the age of generative AI. The article thus offers an integrative framework that honors Wallas's seminal insights while advancing a dynamic, multi-level model suited to contemporary human–AI creative collaboration.

Cognitive control is known to support divergent thinking in adults, but findings in children remain mixed. This study examined the association between cognitive control—measured as a composite score from two executive function tasks—and verbal divergent thinking in 120 French-speaking school-aged children (aged 10 to 12 years). Originality and fluency scores on the Alternate Uses Tests (AUT) and the Consequences Tests (CT) were moderately correlated, supporting their convergent validity. However, children demonstrated higher fluency and originality on the AUT than on the CT. Importantly, the two tasks showed different patterns of association with cognitive control, which was more strongly related to originality in the AUT. This task-specific effect was consistent across both AI- and human-based scoring methods. Additional analyses revealed that children with greater cognitive control generated more original ideas earlier in the tasks, with a gradual decline over time. This temporal pattern remained consistent across both tasks. In contrast, fluency was less consistently related to cognitive control and did not exhibit task-specific effects. Together, these findings provide further evidence that cognitive control plays a role in preadolescents' creative performance, while also highlighting possible task-specific demands that carry important implications for understanding the development and assessment of divergent thinking.

The current study aims to provide a better understanding of the role of family support in promoting workplace creativity via improved individual resilience. Further investigating these relationships, the current study assessed data collected via an online survey of 278 participants. Consistent with existing research on the more general construct of social support and creativity, the results provided support for the idea that home life may prove to be a beneficial antecedent of higher creative functioning at work. Family support was found to be directly related to improved self-perceptions of individual creativity at work. Individuals reporting higher levels of family support also reported higher levels of workplace resilience. Additionally, employee resilience was found to partially mediate the positive relationship between family support and creativity.

The introduction of the PISA 2022 Creative Thinking assessment underscores the growing need for scalable, valid, and reliable methods to evaluate creativity in international large-scale assessments. Traditional human scoring, while nuanced, is time-consuming, costly, and subject to inconsistencies. This paper explores recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP)—particularly transformer-based large language models (LLMs)—as promising alternatives for automated scoring. We review three methodological approaches: (1) unsupervised methods using semantic distance, (2) supervised fine-tuning with labeled data, and (3) few−/zero-shot learning using prompt-based inference. Empirical findings from verbal and visual creative tasks show that AI-based scoring systems can approximate human ratings with substantial accuracy (r = 0.70–0.85), even across different languages and task formats. A case study using the PISA Book Covers task demonstrates convergence between AI and human scores, with reliability levels comparable to traditional scoring. However, key challenges remain, particularly regarding cross-cultural comparability, bias mitigation, and interpretability. We discuss psychometric strategies (e.g., Many-Facet Rasch Models) to model these issues and propose future directions, including scoring of distinct creativity dimensions and developing transparent, open-source platforms. If rigorously validated, AI-based scoring offers a feasible and equitable path forward for assessing creativity globally.