Commentary on the Functional Creativity Model: Its Application to Understanding Innovative Deception

Cropley, Kaufman, and Cropley (this issue) provide an account of creativity and antisocial behavior, the Functional Creativity Model (FMC), which has utility in the ongoing fight against creative acts of terrorism. Herein, their model is evaluated through its application to understanding the malevolent creativity behind the antisocial use of deception. In particular, malevolent lies that hoodwink victims or unwitting collaborators are considered as part of the planning of terrorists of dastardly deeds. The FMC is also applied to evaluating the counterterrorist prospects of Time Restricted Integrity Confirmation, an innovate method of lie detection that incorporates many of the antiterrorist recommendations of Cropley et al., especially the element of surprise. Recommendations for expanding the FMC are offered.     

Commentary on Malevolent Creativity

In Malevolent creativity: A functional model of creativity in terrorism and crime, Cropley, Kaufman, and Cropley (this issue) insightfully highlight two important aspects of the creative process. First, although it may not be popular nor initially obvious to discuss negatively applied, malevolent creativity, or terrorism/crime as potentially creative acts, it is certainly to our detriment not to if we truly seek to understand the full-spectrum under which the creative process operates. The second issue examined is the process by which a creative product's novelty declines with the passing of time. Each are briefly discussed.     

Malevolent Creativity: A Functional Model of Creativity in Terrorism and Crime

Although creativity is often seen as an aspect of self-fulfillment, it is important to recognize its social effects. The traditional view is that these should be beneficial, creativity thus being benevolent. However, those who wish to do deliberate harm to others can also display creativity, in this case malevolent creativity. This is governed by the same principles as benevolent creativity, differing only in its intended purpose. Like any creativity, malevolent creativity can be examined through its products. Concepts from research on creative products provide important insights into the activities of terrorists and criminals, especially the idea of competing solutions. The key ideas in malevolent creativity are summarized in 11 principles; recognizing these helps in developing more effective means for counteracting terrorism.     

青少年心理韧性与恶意创造性行为倾向的关系

恶意创造力因其独特的“危害性”而与一般创造力有所区分。积极的人格特质如心理韧性由于可以促进一般创造力但对恶意有所抑制, 故其对恶意创造力的影响尚不清楚。通过2个研究考察心理韧性与恶意创造力的关系及其作用机制, 以及心理韧性与应激对恶意创造力的共同作用。结果表明：心理韧性水平能够显著负向预测青少年的恶意创造性行为, 且主要通过积极应对方式对恶意创造性行为起作用; 心理韧性对恶意创造性行为的影响也会受到应激环境的调节, 即相对于非应激条件, 应激条件下削弱了积极应对方式对恶意创造性行为的抑制作用。这些结果表明有必要注重培养青少年的心理韧性以抵御外界环境的不良影响, 并正确引导其创造力的发展。     

愤怒情绪对不同类型恶意创造力表现的影响

个体的恶意创造力主要体现在伤害、欺骗与捉弄他人三方面。本研究旨在考察愤怒情绪对上述三类恶意创造力表现的影响及作用路径。研究设计了愤怒、恐惧和中性三种情绪诱发条件（后两者分别作为愤怒情绪的消极和中性情绪对照）,以考察不同情绪状态下个体在三类恶意创造力表现上的差异。结果发现,对于伤害和欺骗他人,愤怒情绪诱发组在观点流畅性、新颖性和伤害性上均高于中性情绪诱发组;而对于捉弄他人,愤怒情绪诱发组仅在观点流畅性和新颖性上高于中性情绪诱发组。内隐攻击性中介了愤怒情绪对三类恶意创造力表现的影响,而情绪唤醒度仅中介了愤怒情绪对伤害他人恶意创造力表现的影响。上述结果表明,内隐攻击性是愤怒情绪促进不同类型恶意创造力的通用路径,而情绪唤醒度是愤怒情绪促进伤害他人恶意创造力的特异路径。     

Rejoinder to Commentaries on Malevolent Creativity: A Functional Model of Creativity in Terrorism and Crime,Cropley, Kaufman,and Cropley

In this rejoinder Cropley et al. respond to commentaries made regarding the article “Malevolent Creativity: A Functional Model of Creativity in Terrorism and Crime.” Each commentary adds valuable additional insight into the issue of creativity that does harm.     

愤怒情绪对恶意创造力的影响及调节策略

以两个实验考察愤怒情绪对恶意创造力表现的影响及作用路径, 并探究调节愤怒情绪对削弱恶意创造力表现的效应。实验1比较愤怒、悲伤、中性情绪下个体恶意创造力表现的差异, 发现愤怒情绪下个体生成更多、更新颖的恶意观点, 情绪唤醒度和内隐攻击性中介了愤怒对恶意创造力表现的影响。实验2探究不同情绪调节策略(认知重评、表达抑制)如何影响愤怒个体的恶意创造力表现, 发现认知重评组和表达抑制组的恶意创造力表现比无策略的控制组水平更低, 情绪唤醒度和内隐攻击性中介了两种情绪调节策略对个体恶意创造力表现的影响。上述结果表明, 愤怒情绪通过提升内隐攻击性和情绪唤醒度进而促进个体恶意创造力表现, 而认知重评和表达抑制策略可作为削弱愤怒个体的恶意创造力表现的有效策略。     

Malevolent Creativity: Does Personality Influence Malicious Divergent Thinking?

The purpose of this research was to examine the relationship between malevolent creativity and personality, with a specific focus on the traits of antagonism, aggression, and sympathy. Participants (N = 265) completed a series of personality measures and two divergent thinking tasks (uses for a brick and a pencil). Responses were coded for fluency and malevolent creativity. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses revealed that gender, conscientiousness, and trait physical aggression accounted for unique variability in malevolent creativity scores. These results confirm the link between personality and malevolent creativity, corroborating the General Model of Aggression and extending understanding of malevolent creativity, a new subfield of creativity research.     

Whether “Malevolent” or “Negative,” Creativity Is Relevant to Terrorism Prevention: Lessons From 9/11 and Hazardous Material Trucking

Cropley, Kaufman, and Cropley (this issue) make an important contribution in arguing for the value of creativity for terrorism prevention. Their message will be, though, somewhat more novel for scientific researchers and theorists than for the intelligence and security communities. It also leaves out many concepts and techniques, from the Psychology of Creativity literature, which are relevant to the theme of preventing terrorism. In this article, we give some attention to examining the constructs and analyses presented by Cropley et al. Most of our effort is, however, devoted to using Cropley et al.'s ideas as the starting point for a more detailed discussion of applying cognitive psychology, social psychology, organizational psychology, and security-profession ideas to creatively anticipating potential creative terrorism attacks, and devising creative counter-measures against such attacks. To illustrate the potential application of the Psychology of Creativity to terrorism, results are presented of a pilot study on using the Red-Team/Green-Team, Attack-Defense Tree, and Nominal Group techniques to generate possible creative approaches to anticipating and countering terrorism.     

Indexing Creativity Fostering Teacher Behavior: A Preliminary Validation Study

Research on teachers' creativity fostering behavior has been much neglected in spite of the important role teachers play in developing student creativity. One possible reason for this is the lack of a suitable measure of teachers' creativity fostering behavior. A 45‐item self‐rating scale based on nine creativity fostering behaviors identified by Cropley (1997) was developed and validated with self‐describing adjectives checklist. Analysis shows adequate construct and concurrent validities. Specific teachers' creativity fostering behaviors were found to correlate with sex and ethnicity. Further work is suggested.     

Measuring Tactical Innovation in Terrorist Attacks

Terrorism provides a unique context for examining innovation, as the generation of novel, effective, and complex ideas are essential for survival in destructive and malevolent groups. Despite this, innovation remains an underdeveloped concept in terrorism research, at least from the creativity scholars. One reason for this is the limited empirical data about this phenomenon, making it unclear which tenets of creativity research hold versus which do not translate in the domain of terrorism. This two-part study explores this rich domain by examining the dimensions of innovation in a robust sample of terrorist attacks. Findings indicated that three dimensions of innovation (i.e., novelty, relevance, and elegance) emerged from the attack data and that these dimensions were related to different attack characteristics. This article expands our understanding of terrorist innovation by drawing from established theory and methods from creativity research and highlights their manifestations in this understudied domain.     

创造力有其“阴暗面”

创造力有其“阴暗面”。从产品角度而言,创造力可产出伤害性或消极的产品;从个体角度而言,高创造力者可能具有一些消极特征,如精神疾病易感性强、宜人性差、说谎、不诚信等;从情境角度而言,高创造力表现可能与不信任感、生存危机感、社会拒绝等消极因素有关。未来研究应开发高生态效度的恶意创造力测评工具,改进计算恶意创造力水平的算法,探索消极个体特征和消极情境因素作用于创造性思维的认知与神经机制。     

Measurement of Creative Teaching in Mathematics Class

The current study serves two main purposes: (1) proposing a framework suggesting several conditions that mathematics teachers should establish to increase student creativity, and (2) developing and validating a scale based on the framework, aimed at measuring to what extent mathematics teachers establish a learning environment for their students to foster creativity. The analysis benefited from Sternberg’s Investment Theory of Creativity and Cropley’s framework in addition to other studies on creativity when developing the scale. The participants consisted of two groups of mathematics teachers. Data from the first group (n = 423) were used for exploratory factor analysis. The second group (n = 410) were used for confirmatory factor analysis. Based on results of the exploratory factor analysis, 5 items were removed from the scale. Results of confirmatory factor analysis supported the construct validity of the trimmed scale. Based on these results, there is evidence that the scale can be employed confidently to measure different dimensions of creativity-fostering behaviors of mathematics teachers.     

Creativity and mental health in everyday life

Abstract

The connection between mental health and creativity has traditionally been studied in terms of outstanding aesthetic‐professional creativity and mental illness. More interesting however, is the possible connection between “everyday “ creativity and mental health. Everyday creativity involves attacking day to day activities in a divergent way: It derives from a complex of cognitive, affective, personal, motivational, and social factors, and is characterized by openness, flexibility, autonomy, playfulness, humor willingness to take risks, and perseverance. These characteristics are also consistently emphasized in models of “normal”; personality growth, so that the possibility of promoting mental health arises by fostering creativity in day to day life. Several small studies described in this article give examples of how this might be done and the kinds of benefits which can result.     

Creativity in Horizontal and Vertical Domains

Traditionally creativity has been examined based on the creator-centered model, and it has been assumed that creativity is the same across all knowledge domains. This article presents an argument that challenges the traditional view: Creativity is also shaped by the structural constraints a domain places on the process of creativity. To explore how domain constraints are related to creativity, 2 types of domains are distinguished. Horizontal domains allow novelty to occur in all dimensions, resulting in divergent developments of the domain. Vertical domains, in contrast, possess certain stable elements that are existentially fundamental to the domain, thus permitting alteration only around certain dimensions. The horizontality and verticality of domains are examined in this article through 5 structural parameters identifiable in a domain: the aim; methods; symbol systems and uses; rules; and standards of quality. Modem Western and traditional Chinese ink brush painting are used as comparative examples for the illustration of the theory.     

Creating Creativity: Reflections from Fieldwork

The present article addresses the question of ‘When can we say something is creative?’ and, in answering it, takes a critical stand towards past and present scientific definitions of creativity. It challenges an implicit assumption in much psychological theory and research that creativity exists as an ‘objective’ feature of persons or products, universally recognised and independent of social agreement and cultural systems of norms and beliefs. Focusing on everyday life creative outcomes, the article includes both theoretical accounts and empirical examples from a research exploring creativity evaluations in the context of folk art. In the end, a multi-layered perspective of creativity assessment emerges, integrating dimensions such as newness and originality, value and usefulness, subjective reception and cultural reception of creative products. Implications for how we understand and study creativity are discussed.     

Scientific Discovery as Creative Exploration: Faraday's Experiments

In this article, I address the distance between historical and psychological approaches to creativity (particularly cognitive approaches). I argue that neither can get very far without the other, and I offer examples from the creative work of Michael Faraday, the eminent 19th-century physicist. These examples display similarities between fine detail of Faraday's creative work and the broad sweep of his development and illustrate the tension between historians' attention to particular features of creativity and cognitive scientists' desire for general, preferably computable features. I conclude with a discussion of the difficult issue of finding a common language based on agreement about appropriate levels of abstraction.     

Nineteenth-Century Foundations of Creativity Research

Although many refer to the 1950s as the beginning of modern investigations into creativity, foundational work was done during the 19th century. This article focuses on that work. The 19th-century creativity literature addressed five basic questions: (a) How is creativity defined? (b) Who has creativity? (c) What are the characteristics of creative people? (d) Who should benefit from creativity? and (e) Can creativity be increased through conscious effort? Authors reviewed in this article wrote from a generalist, often philosophical perspective with little experimental basis for their conclusions. Given that we continue to address these same issues today, one wonders whether these are the enduring questions of the field or if we have not progressed as far as we had hoped.     

Toward a transcendental account of creativity. Kant and Merleau-Ponty on the creative power of judgment and creativity as institution

Several works published in the last decades defend the claim that the concept of creativity should be demystified. With the aim of showing that creativity is not an obscure power owned by only few individuals and free from constraints, authors working at the intersection field between philosophy and cognitive science have notably focused on the structure and evolution of cognitive mechanisms underlying our creative capacities. While taking up the suggestion that we should try not to mystify creativity, this article argues that what is required for such demystification is primarily a transcendental and phenomenological inquiry. Kant’s and Merleau-Ponty’s works are here discussed in order to develop such a transcendental inquiry into creativity. Both Kant and Merleau-Ponty bring to the fore the conditions of possibility for creative acts, and highlight fundamental role of creativity itself in the formation of meaningfulness. The keystone of both philosophers’ inquiries is the emphasis on the interdependence between creativity and rules. Yet, due to the different approaches to the transcendental, Kant’s and Merleau-Ponty’s accounts do not fully converge, but should rather be considered as complementary.