Journal of Creative Behavior最新文献

Creativity and learning have long been connected in scholarship, with emphasis on developing and facilitating personal creativity. For this Fulbright-sponsored, exploratory qualitative study, I aimed to understand how college students construct meaning of creativity where contextual constraints exist using Kaufman and Beghetto's Four C Model of Creativity. Based on an international case study, the research question was, What forms of student creativity might emerge in constrained college classroom environments? I describe creativity concepts and provide an application from my program Creativity Under Duress in three countries. Methodologies were adapted from educational psychology to discover whether creative expression could manifest in difficult situations. Undergraduate and graduate students (N = 152) in education and humanities courses participated in four creative activities: written response to prompts, personal creativity essay, 3D paper poster, and 4-Cs presentation script. Student responses to my intervention paradoxically showed genuine creative engagement despite high-pressure, test-driven contexts and with time limits on each activity. This was the greatest outcome associated with revealing creativity in classrooms across different cultures.

Some types of instructions for creativity tasks (such as explicitly telling people to be creative) can boost performance. Showing people examples or telling them ways of approaching the problem before they begin a creativity task can help, but results are mixed about whether it is better to emphasize positive examples/approaches that can be emulated or negative examples/approaches that should be avoided. In this study, 198 participants wrote two brief essays—one under a positive exemplar instructional condition and one under a negative exemplar instructional condition. The results showed that the stories of participants written under the positive instructional condition were rated significantly higher in overall creativity, originality, and humor than the stories written under the negative instructional condition. Results are discussed in light of previous findings.

When people are working on creative tasks, they make progress in conscious thought (CT) and unconscious thought (UT) processes. UT occurs outside conscious awareness, and unlike CT, it is independent of working memory resources. Previous studies suggest UT is more influential under certain conditions, known as the UT effect. Typically, these studies utilize a UT paradigm where participants are divided into CT and UT groups: the CT group reflects on the task, while the UT group engages in a distraction. However, UT effect is inconsistent across studies. This study aims to explore the condition under which UT effect works and how to facilitate it. By manipulating performance-contingent reward, this study compared the creativity of UT and CT in reward and non-reward conditions under a modified UT paradigm (N = 179). Creativity was measured by a divergent thinking task (the unusual uses task). Results indicated the fluency and originality in the reward condition were higher than non-reward condition for the UT group. What's more, UT surpassed CT in fluency and originality only in the reward condition. This study extends UT theory and provides insights in maximizing the benefits of UT, enabling individuals to boost creativity without thinking consciously or consuming working memory resources.

Considering the pivotal role of creativity across various eras and the rapid integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in both creative processes and education, this study introduces and provides validity evidence for the AI-assisted Creativity Questionnaire (AICQ). This new 16-item instrument aims to quantify human creative potential in AI-assisted endeavors. Initially, a diverse cohort of 322 university students in Taiwan completed the AICQ from November to December 2023. Through exploratory factor analysis (EFA) of responses from this sample, three distinct factors emerged: (1) AI-assisted functional creativity (AIFC), (2) AI-assisted visual artistic creativity (AIVAC), and (3) AI-assisted ideational creativity (AIIC). One item was removed due to cross-loading. Subsequently, in September 2024, 330 university students in Taiwan engaged with both the AICQ and the 28-item Creative Behavior Inventory (CBI). Based on responses from this sample, construct validity evidence for the AICQ was examined using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), which affirmed that a three-factor model provided a good fit to the data. Gender differences in AICQ scores were found in these subsequent data. Overall, data from participants provided evidence for the reliability as well as convergent, concurrent, and discriminant validity of the scores obtained from the AICQ.

The OECD's PISA program assesses 15-year-old students globally in key competencies every 3 years, providing influential data on education quality and spurring policy debates. In the latest cycle, the innovation domain focused on creative thinking, assessing over 140,000 students across 60+ countries, in the largest study of adolescent creativity to date. This innovation domain included a cognitive test covering multiple creative thinking processes (generating creative ideas, generating diverse ideas, and evaluating/improving ideas) and creativity domains (written expression, visual expression, social problem-solving, and scientific problem-solving), as well as an extensive survey on factors influencing creativity (such as openness, creative self-efficacy, or growth mindset). While this dataset offers unprecedented research opportunities due to its scale and international scope, challenges arise from its aggregated scoring and complex sampling design. Missteps in using this data in secondary analyses could lead to fragmented and inconsistent findings. This paper provides an overview of the PISA 2022 creative thinking assessment's framework, methods, and findings, highlighting both the potential and the caution needed for impactful creativity research.

People systematically overlook subtractive changes and favor additive ones when reporting new ideas. In a first preregistered experiment conducted via the Prolific platform among French adults (N = 477), we replicated experiments 2, 3, and 4 in Adams et al.'s study. We replicated the overlooking of subtraction, as participants reported 1155 additive ideas and only 297 subtractive ideas. Cueing participants (“Remember that you can add things or take them away”) increased the percentage of participants who reported at least one subtractive idea (overall OR = 2.52, improvement condition, ϕ = 0.18, make it worse condition, ϕ = 0.24). In a second experiment conducted to test how the framing of the cue influences the overlook, participants reported more subtractive ideas when they read a subtract-only cue (“remember that you can take things away”), than with a subtract-then-add cue. Results therefore provided empirical support for the overlooking of subtractive changes hypothesis, mitigated by a cue. We also found that norms affected the report of new ideas (descriptive OR = 7.49, injunctive OR = 6.86). Cues and injunctive (but not descriptive) norms were both related to the asymmetry.

Group diversity is an active topic in research as studies examine how differences in background, culture, job position, gender, and ethnicity can all impact group creativity. One relatively overlooked component is how diversity in academic knowledge affects group and individual creativity. In this study, 56 graduate students from a research university in the United States were paired into a dyad with another academically similar or diverse student. They then took the Alternate Uses Test (AUT) alone, as a team, and then alone again. The AUT was used to obtain three divergent thinking scores—fluency, flexibility, and originality. The scores were analyzed to determine if graduate students in academically diverse dyads worked better together (and, subsequently, alone) compared to academically similar dyads. The results showed that academically diverse dyads had significantly higher scores on originality for both increases in individual task scores and the team creativity task, as well as higher fluency scores compared to academically similar dyads. In addition, the results suggest that academically similar and diverse dyads demonstrate varying patterns of fluency and originality scores over time. Results indicated that embracing academic diversity can lead to both dyads and, subsequently, individuals being more productive in generating novel ideas.

The traditionally studied positive outcomes of creativity tend to be product-focused, such as Big-C contributions, good grades, or strong work performance. This paper makes an argument for the importance of less-discussed products of the process—the benefits that arise from being creative, regardless of one's abilities or level of achievement. These positive outcomes are more tied to such meaning-related concepts as self-understanding, feeling one's life is significant and worth living, and gaining both short-term and long-term purposes. In highlighting these potential consequences of being creative, we get to question clear separations between processes and products in the field of creativity studies and show that engaging in the creative process itself “produces” experiences that are less tangible or even noticeable but by no means unimportant.