James suggests that individuals develop a global or holistic perception of their work environment (e.g., James & Jones, 1974), which could be applied to any number of contexts and industries. It has a long history of research in many disciplines, and involves a variety of conceptual and methodological approaches. Biologists or ethologists usually either focus on animal problem solving or else consider creativity to be an evolutionary adaptation. The first is the Remote Associates Test, or RAT, that was introduced by Mednick (1962). Another neural network identified as important for creativity is the salience network, which includes the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula (Abraham, Rutter, Bantin, & Hermann, 2018; Beaty et al., 2015; Heinonen et al., 2016). Mednick believed that the creative process requires the ability to associate ideas that are considered very far apart conceptually. Here are the four main approaches to this area of psychology. As the componentional model previously suggested, the interactionist model also stresses the role played by the context, but it further adds the notion that the effects between person and situation are not simply additive but are instead of an interactive nature. Copyright © 2021 Elsevier B.V. or its licensors or contributors. How did that person influence you and what problem did you solve using creativity? 39). Introduction. The variety of current creativity theories has plusses and minuses. For example, using a brick as a paperweight represents a different conceptual category that using its volume to conserve water in a toilet tank. Not one of them existed until somebody came up with the idea. Creative thinking is the ability to consider something in a new way. Thus there are many different divergent thinking skills rather than a single divergent thinking skill. Did you have an idea for improving this content? Creative people may take problems that other people see, or they themselves may previously have seen, in one way, and redefine the problems in a different way. Two of the primary components of creativity include:1 1. Paula Thomson and Victoria S. Jacque have produced a comprehensive, meaningful work that is readable, grounded in the literature, and of great interest to scholars and performers alike. Rex E. Jung, PhD, is an assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico, a research scientist at the Mind Research Network and a practicing clinical neuropsychologist in Albuquerque. Prevailing approaches to individual and group creativity have focused on personal factors that contribute to creative behavior (e.g., personality, intelligence, motivation), and the processes of behaving creatively and appreciating creativity are understood to be largely unrelated. In this work, Mednick argued that creativity could be predicted from associative hierarchies. Finally, we have to assume that if an idea scores zero on any one criterion then it must have zero creativity as well. Simply put, to the extent that creativity is domain specific, creativity testing becomes that much more difficult. She argued that three variables were needed for creativity to occur: domain-relevant skills, creativity-relevant skills, and task motivation. They explain, in detail, the considerable deviation in conceptualizations mentioned above—that dual-process theories of cognition predominantly focus on distinctions of autonomy and control in dividing types of processing, whereas creativity researchers tend to focus on the difference between generative and evaluative processes, and divergent and convergent thinking. There are a lot of definitions for creativity. Intelligence would primarily occur at the domain-relevant skill level. As the evidence surrounding the importance of interaction between associative and executive processing in creative thought continues to emerge, at both the behavioral and neural levels, many have articulated a need for dual-process theoretical frameworks that can more fully account for this interplay. Based on different theoretical frameworks, several models of climate have been developed identifying a number of dimensions that can influence creativity and innovation (cf. The responses can be scored on four dimensions: (a) fluency, the total number of appropriate uses generated; (b) originality, the statistical rarity of the uses given; (c) flexibility, the number of distinct conceptual categories implied by the various uses; and (d) elaboration, the amount of detail given for the generated uses. Freud later retracted this view. That is why we cannot use the singular; there is no such thing as the “creative process.” Nonetheless, the various processes do share one feature: All enable the person to “think outside the box” imposed by routine thinking—to venture into territory that would otherwise be ignored (Simonton, 2011). Specifically, we really have to speak of degree to which an idea satisfies each of the three criteria. In his article “Analysis of creativity” Mel Rhodes (1961) analyzed 40 definitions of creativity and 16 definitions of imagination, and developed and proved the holistic model of creativity – 4 Ps, representing it as the interaction of 4 factors: process, product, person, and press. In Animal Creativity and Innovation, 2015. Wiley and Jarosz (2012) agree that creative problem-solving requires a mixture of “non-goal-directed processes and more controlled, attention-demanding processes” (p. 260) and call for “a dual-process model of problem solving that incorporates both analytic and nonanalytic processes” (p. 261). The Blind-Variation-and-Selective-Retention model of Campbell (1960), Simonton's (1999) Darwinian theory of creativity, Finke, Ward, and Smith's (1992) Genoplore model, and Howard-Jones’ (2002) dual-state model of creative thought all articulate the distinction between generating ideas and evaluating them, and the importance of this back and forth in creativity. The goal of the Handbook of Creativity is to provide the most comprehensive, definitive, and authoritative single-volume review available in the field of creativity. In another task, positive mood was detrimental to performance, whereas in a third task, no significant differences between the different moods appeared. This particular question is relatively easy, others are much more difficult, but it gives you the basic idea. Approaches to cognition. Creativity training programs aimed at a particular domain can easily limit their training exercises to ones connected to that domain, while programs aimed at increasing creativity in general – the vast majority of programs – must be careful not to limit their training exercises to just one or a few content domains. This constitutes a deviation from a majority of cognitive psychological research, though this focus is unsurprising given that creativity has been defined by the content of generated thought and the relatively clear demarcation between the functional purpose of generation and evaluation. The results suggested that the relationship demonstrated between elevated positive mood and creativity may reflect increased productivity, in the sense of quantity of products, but it did not generalize to a higher quality of creativity. Guilford identified only 186 papers directly focused on creativity in his assessment of the literature in the years from 1927 to 1950, but Arons's (1965) review found over 800 records in the mere decade following the address. Indeed, it often should be unique. Biologists or ethologists usually either focus on animal problem solving or else consider creativity to be an evolutionary adaptation. Amabile’s Componential Model (1983) describes creativity as the product of the combination of three factors: domain relevant skills, which refer to factual knowledge and expertise in a certain domain; creativity-relevant skills, which refer to the strategies and cognitive styles that influence idea production; and intrinsic motivation, conceptualized as the individual’s genuine interest in the task. Open mobile menu Psychology Today In the meantime, both views will continue to claim adherents among researchers and theorists. 2. It is quite possible that both domain specificity and generality are true, each in part and in its own way. Renzulli distinguishes between two types of giftedness – schoolhouse (i.e., what would be measured by an ability or achievement test) and creative-production. Creativity can be observed across multiple domains of human behavior including problem solving, artistic and athletic engagement, scientific reasoning, decision making, business and marketing, leadership styles, and social interactions. Observations of the importance of cognitive control in creative thinking are also apparent in research on creative analogical reasoning. Some reasons for this have already been discussed, such as the lure of GUTs in other fields like physics8 and biology and the simple fact that life (and creativity research) would be so much easier if a single, grand unifying theory of creativity were possible. Another theory that views creativity as a mix of different abilities is Amabile's componential model of creativity. Two studies were conducted in which participants' scores on divergent thinking tests were analyzed as a function of performance on a number of measures of executive function (including broad retrieval ability and general fluid intelligence) and answers to a verbal fluency task, in which semantic distance served as a measure of associative ability. At present, unprecedented significance is being attribute… Figure 2. We sought a wide variety of contributors and commenters, both in terms of fields (we span psychology, biology, neuroscience, engineering, business, ecology, and education) and location (the contributors come from 12 countries). This section contains some of my own research into the psychology of creativity, including my MA critical research paper, plus further thoughts and discussions on various related subjects. MA Critical research paper (submitted 2009) A necessary process: The psychology of creativity As an illustrator I have always channeled my efforts into creating highly polished, technique-driven… For example, analyses of scientific and artistic achievements suggest that the median-rated creativity of work in a domain tends to fall toward the lower end of the distribution and the upper - high creativity - tail extends quite far. Main article: creativity techniques Daniel Pink, in his 2005 book A Whole New Mind, repeating arguments posed throughout the 20th century, argues that we are entering a new age where creativity is becoming increasingly important. Creativity requires that you go where you don’t know where you’re going. Dr. Tom Steitz, former Sterling Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at Yale University, spent his career looking at the structure and specific aspects of RNA molecules and how their interactions could help produce antibiotics and ward off diseases. No other scientist came up with the idea. In later work, Beaty, Benedek, Kaufman, and Silvia (2015) also employed temporal connectivity analysis to show interactions within these regions, whereas participants generated novel ideas, demonstrating that creative thought relies on “cooperation between brain networks linked to cognitive control and spontaneous thought, which may reflect focused internal attention and the top-down control of spontaneous cognition during creative idea production” (p. 1). If creativity is domain specific, it means that a single theory of creativity – such as the theory that divergent thinking is a basic component of all creative thinking – cannot account for the diversity of creativity across domains. A successful creator will generate ideas that may be initially unpopular or underappreciated (as in buying stocks with low price-earnings ratios), yet will persist and convince others of the ideas’ merits. On the plus side, there is a pluralistic array of perspectives available, which admirably attempt to understand many aspects of this complex phenomenon, which account for current data reasonably well, and which have the potential for a great deal of integration and cross-connection. To name just a few, we highlight KEYS (Amabile, et al., 1996); the Team Climate for Innovation (TCI; Anderson & West, 1998; West & Farr, 1989); the Siegal Scale of Support for Innovation (SSSI; Siegel & Kaemmerer, 1978), and the Creative Climate Questionnaire (CCQ, Ekvall, 1996). In fact, Baer (1994a, 1994b, 1994c)1994a1994b1994c provided convincing evidence that creativity is not only content specific but is also task specific within content areas. On the minus side, many theories, generally speaking, have not progressed far beyond earlier speculative claims and have often failed to spark the identification of new phenomena and counterintuitive testable hypotheses. There has not been a synthesized collection and exchange of ideas between the two communities until now, however, despite the clear benefits to understanding the benefits of creativity in both an evolutionary and cognitive sense. Here, the participant is asked to generate alternative uses for a common object, such as a brick. However, other theoretical approaches may approach creativity more as a trait, which should be apparent in the way creativity is measured. Most creativity training programs already use a wide variety of tasks, spread across various content domains, in the exercises they use to improve divergent thinking and other creative thinking skills. For example, a solution must, in fact, solve the problem. Finally, selective comparison involves relating new information to old information in a novel way. James C. Kaufman, in Creativity and the Performing Artist, 2017. Central to most, if not all models of organizational behavior, are perceptions of the work environment, referred to generally as “organizational climate” (Rousseau, 1988). This emphasis on the way that responses are autonomously generated is still apparent in modern creativity research and the way that experiments are structured. In contrast with macro-level innovation research, which focused essentially on contextual factors but disregarded the individual (e.g., Aiken & Hage, 1971), psychology research placed less emphasis on the context and more importance on identifying the characteristics of the creative individual. Test your own creativity at this website by taking one of five common creativity tests. What about using it as sidewalk chalk? The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity (Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology) - Kindle edition by Kaufman, James C., Sternberg, Robert J.. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. We will refer in more detail to TCI and KEYS later in this chapter (for a comprehensive review see Mathisen & Einarsen, 2004). Atchley, Strayer, & Atchley, 2012; Ball & Stevens, 2009; Beaty & Silvia, 2012, 2013; Benedek, Franz, Heene, & Neubauer, 2012; Chein & Weisberg, 2014; Gilhooly, Fioratou, Anthony, & Wynn, 2007; Gupta, Jang, Mednick, & Huber, 2012; Nusbaum & Silvia, 2011; Silvia, 2008; Silvia & Beaty, 2012, Beaty, Silvia, Nusbaum, Jauk, & Benedek (2014), Beaty, Benedek, Kaufman, and Silvia (2015), Abraham, Rutter, Bantin, & Hermann, 2018; Beaty et al., 2015; Heinonen et al., 2016, The Effect of Mood On Creativity in the Innovative Process, Even if we keep strictly within the specific task domain of creative problem-solving, however, several findings anomalous to the positive mood-enhance-, Domain Specificity: Introduction and Overview, Within the field of creativity research, psychologists tend to stick to the study of humans. All of the named items were products of the creative mind. He wrote, “Looking back over the development and progress of my career in science, I am reminded how vitally important good mentorship is in the early stages of one’s career development and constant face-to-face conversations, debate and discussions with colleagues at all stages of research. Creative arts therapies or expressive arts therapy are dynamic, participatory approaches that capitalize on nonverbal expression of thoughts and feelings. Unlike convergent thinking, which converges on the single best answer or solution, divergent thinking comes up with multiple possibilities that might vary greatly in usefulness. Unfortunately, many different cognitive processes have been linked to creativity (Simonton & Damian, 2013). In this model, a creative person is like a talented Wall Street investor. Primarily understood as the intervening variable between the context of an organization and the responses and behavior of its members, the concept has inspired many descriptions and operationalizations. Sense creation in the structure of processes of meaning dynamics. Tests of creativity in specific content domains – which might use the consensual assessment technique to evaluate the creativity of products, or might instead find simpler (perhaps paper-and-pencil) techniques for assessing domain specific skills – would still be possible in principle, but they could be of only limited range and applicability. West and colleagues’ climate model is, in our awareness, the only model focusing on team level climate (Anderson & West, 1998; West, 1990; West & Anderson, 1996). Most accounts of this finding emphasize the associative organization of information, with more proximal associates becoming active first, followed by more distal creative ideas later. More recently, researchers have departed from a general conceptualization of climate and have turned their focus to specific types or facets of climate, such as climate for safety, climate for service and climate for initiative (Baer & Frese, 2003; Schneider & Reichers, 1983; Schneider, Wheeler, & Cox, 1992). Creativity has long stood as an integral facet of what it means to be human and has served as an object of deep discussion, but, for most of our time pondering it as a species, it has remained mysterious, ephemeral, and even mystical. There has been significant debate surrounding the relative importance of the contributions of associative and executive processes in creative cognition, with arguments made both for associative theories of creativity and for controlled-attention theories of creativity (for reviews, see Barr, 2018 and Benedek & Jauk, 2018). The development of the social psychological approach to the study of creativity was to a great extent responsible for bringing together these two research streams, integrating the importance of both individual features and contextual characteristics (Amabile, 1983). An original recipe that produces a dish that tastes too terrible to eat cannot be creative. Especially with all the examples of artists whose work wasn’t deemed creative until after their deaths. Organizational creativity research has its intellectual roots both in creativity research in general, which has been conducted primarily within psychology, and on macro-level approaches to the study of organizational innovation. Geir Kaufmann, in The International Handbook on Innovation, 2003. Similarly, domain specificity of creativity means that creativity testing as currently practiced is necessarily inadequate and of limited validity. We use cookies to help provide and enhance our service and tailor content and ads. Beaty and Silvia (2012) revisited the serial-order effect and found evidence in their experiments for the position that greater cognitive control is implicated in creative thinking: Whereas individuals with lower intelligence exhibited a typical serial-order effect, more intelligent individuals did not, which suggests that these participants were strategically accessing more creative ideas with executive control and management of resources, rather than simply allowing ideas to emerge. The third component, analytical ability, is often measured by traditional intelligence tests. In addition to reviewing existing dual-process theories of creativity, Sowden et al. Finally, Amabile singles out your motivation toward the task at hand. Even the author of the paper arguing for domain generality acknowledged that the tide had turned in favor of a domain-specific view: Recent observers of the theoretical (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988) and empirical (Gardner, 1993; Runco, 1989; Sternberg & Lubart, 1995) creativity literature could reasonably assume that the debate is settled in favor of content specificity. Good ideas do not always sell themselves – the creative person needs to devise strategies for and expend effort in selling those ideas. As noted above, self-report scales of creative behavior suggest more generality of creativity than do assessments of the creativity of actual creative products. Three main ways of measuring creativity have been proposed: the creativity quotient (CQ), psychometrics, and the social-personality approach. General, domain-transcending theories – if true – would have far greater power than domain specific theories that account only for creativity in a limited content domain. Speculating on the gross disregard of creativity up to that point, Guilford (1950) argued that many to that point had viewed genius and creativity as largely synonymous, with intelligence seen as being able to capture most of the meaningful variance in individual creative capacity. Based on a theory of team innovation, the authors developed a four factor model including: In contrast, Amabile and colleagues’ (1996) climate model, grounded in a theory of intrinsic motivation, focuses at the broader organizational climate. There has been one outstanding edited book on the topic—Animal Innovation by Simon Reader and Kevin Laland (Oxford University Press, 2003)—but it was, with some exceptions, focused on work by animal researchers. A. Kozbelt, in Encyclopedia of Creativity (Second Edition), 2011. The 14 dimensions are: Aligned with some of the taxonomies described above, several instruments have been developed to assess a climate for creativity. His work spawned a considerable and concerted effort to isolate aspects of creative potential unrelated to intelligence. The third and last criterion is surprise. In their multilevel, interactionist model of creativity, the authors suggest that creativity is a phenomenon that is influenced by both situational and dispositional factors.