Creative Potential and Multicultural Experiences: The Mediating Role of Creative Self-Efficacy

In two studies, one in Mexico and another one in Germany, we examined the indirect influence of self-reported multicultural experience on creative potential, through its influence on creative self-efficacy, and its direct influence on creative personal identity. In both studies, business students from Mexico and Germany completed a battery of questionnaires assessing creative self-efficacy (with two different operationalizations), creative personal identity, multicultural experiences, and a divergent thinking task designed to generate ideas to solve two different business problems. Structural equation modeling was used to test our hypotheses. Results from both studies found a positive relationship between self-reported multicultural experiences and creative personal identity. Similarly, multicultural experiences had an indirect, positive relationship with originality scores from a divergent thinking task, through its influence on creative self-efficacy. Hence, the positive influence of multicultural experience on creative potential, through creative self-efficacy, was established in two countries and with different operationalizations, trait like versus state like, of creative self-efficacy. The implications of the results were discussed.     

The Question of Survival: The Death of Desire and the Weight of Life

This article aims to document the psychic injuries of torture. Psychic deadness, erasure of intersubjectivity, refusal of meaning-making, perversion of agency, and an inability to bear desire constitute the core features of the post-traumatic landscape of torture. The existential challenges in traumatized lives is examined, and questions are also raised about the ethics and unconscious defensive functions of the term "survival." Clinical materials with various torture patients are reported to explore the process of working through the losses and paradoxes of trauma. The role of unmourned loss and the defense of fetishizing the trauma are highlighted as the motivating force and the problem in the current preoccupation with trauma in modern Western culture.     

Agents of Prosociality: Agency Affirmation Promotes Mutual Prosocial Tendencies and Behavior Among Conflicting Groups

Members of conflicting groups are motivated to restore their ingroup's agency, leading to antisocial tendencies against the outgroup. The present research tested the hypothesis that affirming conflicting groups' agency would increase their members' mutual prosociality. The effectiveness of agency affirmation was demonstrated in three contexts of conflict between groups: Switzerland and the EU following the 2014 referendum (Study 1), Israelis and Palestinians (Study 2), and Israeli rightists and leftists (Study 3). Study 1 found that in a nonconflictual context Swiss participants prioritized their moral (prosocial) over agentic goals, yet in the context of conflict with the EU, they prioritized their agentic over moral goals. This “primacy‐of‐agency” effect, however, was eliminated once their ingroup's agency was affirmed. Studies 2 and 3 demonstrated the positive effect of agency affirmation on prosociality among Israelis referring to Palestinians and Israeli rightists and leftists referring to the adversarial political camp. This effect was mediated by group members' readiness to relinquish some power for the sake of morality. Pointing to the importance of the affirmation's specific content, Studies 2 and 3 demonstrated that morality affirmation failed to increase prosociality. As such, the present research puts forward a promising strategy to reduce hostility and promote prosociality between conflicting groups.     

Technology's Impact on the Creative Potential of Youth

The importance of educating students to think critically and creatively was recognized over 2,000 years ago by Socrates, reworked in the 1950s by Benjamin Bloom, and reinforced by many modern-day educators. With changes in lifestyle brought on by innovations in digital technology, teachers, administrators, and parents alike are questioning the effect that these habits could be having on a student's ability to focus. Teachers, especially, are faced with challenges and unknowns in working with students who have grown up in a digital environment that some researchers warn could be disabling important systems of brain development that relate to lack of exposure with traditional reading. Faced with balancing use of traditional texts and an increase in technological resources, teachers are questioning whether today's students have the innate capability of negotiating higher-order thinking and generating creative ideas, as the nature of study habits undergoes transformation. This article explores how ability to use creative and higher-order thinking processes relates to exposure to modern technology.     

Aerobic Exercise and Creative Potential: Immediate and Residual Effects

The potential effects of aerobic exercise on creative potential were explored both immediately following moderate aerobic exercise and after a 2-hr lag. Sixty college students participated in an experiment consisting of 3 regimens varying the time when a Torrance Test of Creative Thinking was taken in relation to exercise completion. The results supported the hypotheses that creative potential will be greater on completion of moderate aerobic exercise than when not preceded by exercise (immediate effects), that creative potential will be greater following a 2-hr lag time following exercise than when not preceded by exercise (residual effects), and that creative potential will not be significantly different immediately following exercise than after a 2-hr lag time following exercise (enduring residual effects). Limitations and implications for future research were discussed.     

The Profiles of Creative Potential and Personality Characteristics of Adult Professionals

Using 5 divergent thinking indices of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, this study examined the creative profiles of 236 adult professionals and relationships between their creative characteristics and personality types. All these adults were in their middle or late stage of professional development in business, public service, journalism, or a similar profession. Distinctive profiles of creative and personality characteristics were found as a function of the domain. For example, the adults in business, journalism, and law had strength in fluency and a weakness in resistance to premature closure; those in medicine, and research and education showed strength in originality and a weakness in abstractness of titles. Those in business were mostly either an ESTJ or ISTJ type had lower levels of creativity than other professionals. Across the domains, the adults preferring intuition in perceiving information had higher creative potential than those preferring sensing. Domains were significant predictors of most of the tested creativity, even over and above the personality types. Overall, this study supported that creative potential, personality types, and domains are intertwined although further explorations are needed to identify causality among them.     

Bicultural Effects on the Creative Potential of Chinese and French Children

This study examined possible bicultural effects on creative potential of children in four groups of Chinese and French children in Hong Kong and Paris. An international battery of widely used divergent measures (Wallach-Kogan Creativity Tests; WKCT) and newly constructed divergent-plus-integrative measures (Evaluation of Potential Creativity; EPoC) was established for assessment. Study 1 showed that most measures of WKCT and EPoC were reasonably high in reliability and they had expected correlations with the fluency scores of some subtests of Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. Study 2 found some interestingly mixed bicultural effects favoring verbal divergent responses for French children and graphic integrative responses for Chinese children. Compared with Paris-French children, the bicultural Hong Kong-French children had significantly higher scores in figural fluency, figural flexibility, and figural uniqueness of WKCT (requiring only verbal divergent responses) but significantly lower scores in the graphic divergent-exploratory measure of EPoC. Compared with Hong Kong-Chinese children, the bicultural Paris-Chinese children had significantly higher scores in the graphic convergent-integrative measure of EPoC, but significantly lower scores in verbal fluency, verbal flexibility, figural fluency, figural flexibility, figural uniqueness, and figural unusualness of WKCT. Implications of the mixed bicultural effects in relation to the diverse creativity measures and children groups are discussed.     

Creative Metacognitive Feelings as a Source of Information for Creative Self-efficacy,Creativity Potential,Intrapersonal Idea Selection,and Task Enjoyment

Creativity scholars try to untangle the commonalities and differences between creative self-beliefs: creative self-efficacy, creative self-concept, creative metacognition, and creative role identity. While these efforts are already contributing significantly, we would like to suggest that for creative metacognition, we need to go beyond the assessment of confidence beliefs and regulation and include creative metacognitive feelings and intrapersonal idea selection as two additional components. To test the validity of our proposition, this study examined the influence of creative metacognitive feelings on creative self-efficacy, creative potential, accurate intrapersonal idea selection (agreement between individuals’ selection of their most creative idea and two independent judges’ selection of the participants’ best idea), and task enjoyment. To elicit metacognitive feelings, participants were randomly assigned to remember and write down two or six instances in their lives in which they generated novel and useful ideas that helped solve a problem. Participants then completed a questionnaire assessing creative self-efficacy, ease of recall as a proxy of metacognitive feelings, performance on a divergent thinking task, and task enjoyment. Results showed an indirect influence of recalling fewer examples on creative self-efficacy through its influence on metacognitive feelings. Metacognitive feelings then had an indirect influence, through creative self-efficacy, on creative potential and task enjoyment.     

The Search for Mathematical Creativity: Identifying Creative Potential in Middle School Students

The identification of creative potential in mathematics poses many challenges. Much of the research into the identification of mathematical creativity has focused on the development of measurement instruments. Scoring of these instruments is time consuming and subject to scorer interpretation, limiting their use. This study sought a simpler means to obtain indicators of creative potential in mathematics. Existing instruments were used to explore the relationship between mathematical creativity and mathematical achievement, attitude towards mathematics, self-perception of creative ability, gender, and teacher perception of mathematical talent and creative ability. Data were gathered from 89 7th graders in a suburban Connecticut school. The regression model predicted 35% of the variance in mathematical creativity scores. Mathematical achievement was the strongest predictor accounting for 23% of the variance. Student attitudes towards mathematics, self-perception of their own creative abilities, and gender contributed the remaining 12% of variance. Interpretation of the relative importance of the independent variables was complicated by correlations among them.