Flow,Creativity, and Suicide Risk in College Art Majors

This study examined the presence of suicide risk in college student art majors (n = 144) to determine if flow consciousness fostered hope, purpose in life, or resilience, when engaged in through creative expression. Participants (N = 474) completed a battery of assessments measuring depression, suicide risk, creative achievement, flow consciousness, hope, purpose in life, and resilience through an online survey. Suicide risk of art majors was compared to that of non-art majors. Engagement in a creative activity that typically produced flow was predicted to decrease suicide risk as mediated by hope, purpose in life, or resilience variables. Results from the study indicated that art majors were not at a greater risk for suicide than non-art majors. The relationship between flow and suicide risk was significantly mediated by purpose in life. Purpose in life explained 55% of the variance in suicide risk in art majors. Findings suggest that creative activities that induce flow consciousness may be protective factors to suicide risk as a function of purpose in life.     

科学创造力与艺术创造力:启动效应及领域影响

如何有效地提升创造力,是创造力研究和实践领域的核心问题之一.而对创造力表达及其影响机制的把握则是创造力提升的必要前提.本研究计划通过实施科学创造力及艺术创造力的启动实验,以不同专业大学生为被试,来探索科学创造力和艺术创造力表达的个体心理机制,及外部影响的作用模式,从而厘清在动机启动、样例启动和自我启动之间,究竟何种启动模式对创造力的表达最为有效;进而,通过对来自理工科和艺术专业领域评分者对科学创造力及艺术创造力作品的评分比较,来考查两种创造力模式间可能存在的领域影响.经由以上的探究,试图为科学与艺术创造力的发展与促进提供科学依据和建构理论框架.     

Personality and Creativity: The Dual Pathway to Creativity Model and a Research Agenda

To better understand the relation between personality traits and creativity, we invoke the Dual‐Pathway to Creativity model (DPCM) that identifies two pathways to creative outcomes: (1) flexible processing of information (cognitive flexibility) and (2) persistent probing, and systematically and incrementally combining elements and possibilities (cognitive persistence). DPCM further proposes that dispositional or situational variables may influence creativity through either their effects on flexibility or persistence. Here, we propose the idea that approach‐related traits (e.g., openness to experience, extraversion, positive affectivity, and power‐motivation) may lead to greater creativity because they link to enhanced cognitive flexibility, whereas avoidance‐related traits (e.g., negative affectivity and neuroticism) under the right circumstances may lead to greater creativity because they link to enhanced cognitive persistence. Empirical support for this proposition is discussed, and a research agenda for future work on personality and creativity is set.     

Personality and Creativity in Art and Writing: Innovation Motivation,Psychoticism, and (Mal)Adjustment

Undergraduates (N = 68) completed inventories measuring innovation motivation (need to be different and innovation expectancy), psychoticism, extraversion, neuroticism, and symptomatic distress, as well as a sentence completion measure of adjustment. They also wrote lyric poems using an associative procedure and completed house–tree–person drawings. Poems were scored for originality and arousal potential and independently judged for quality by two college writing instructors. Drawings were scored for original features and independently judged for quality by two art therapists. The need to be different and current adjustment problems correlated significantly with both originality scores and judged creativity on both tasks, often interacting to explain much of the variance in creativity. Innovation expectancy and psychoticism displayed significant correlations with some creativity measures. Originality scoring and expert judgment correlated well on both tasks. Originality and judged creativity correlated significantly across creative domains, supporting a domain-general view of creativity.     

Three Avenues for Future Research on Creativity, Innovation, and Initiative

La créativité, l’innovation et l’initiative sont des processus psychologiques qui facilitent la transformation des rôles professionnels individuels, des équipes et des organisations en ce qui est souhaitable. Cet article est donc axé sur des orientations de recherche virtuelles de ce secteur de plus en plus important. Plus précisément, nous indiquons trois graves lacunes, à savoir la nécessité d’une plus grande différenciation des processus, d’une intégration des concepts et d’une analyse transculturelle. Tout d’abord, les différents antécédents potentiels de la créativité spécifique ou des phases de l’innovation ont bénéficié d’une attention insuffisante. Ensuite, la recherche sur la créativité et l’innovation peut être enrichie par une intégration des concepts de proactivité récemment développés telles que l’initiative personelle et la parole. Enfin, les différences transculturelles dans les valeurs, les orientations motivationnelles et les préférences relatives au leadership peuvent rendre compte de la façon dont la créativité et l’innovation sont mises en ?uvre et cultivées à travers le monde. Eu égard à chacun de ces futurs défis, nous faisons des suggestions pour des avancées théoriques et empiriques et discutons des développements virtuels pratiques et méthodologiques. Creativity, innovation, and initiative are psychological processes that facilitate the transformation of individual work roles, teams, and organisations into desired future states. Therefore, the present paper focuses on potential research trends in this increasingly important area. Specifically, we identify three substantive gaps reflecting the needs for greater process differentiation, concept integration, and cross‐cultural analysis. First, potential differential antecedents of specific creativity or innovation phases have received insufficient attention. Second, the creativity and innovation research domain may benefit from an integration of recently developed proactivity concepts such as personal initiative and voice behavior. Third, cross‐cultural differences in values, motivational orientations, and leadership preferences may determine how creativity and innovation are enacted and cultivated across the globe. With respect to each of these future challenges, we provide suggestions for theoretical and empirical advancements and discuss potential practical and methodological developments.     

Context for Creativity: Listening to Voices,Allowing a Pause

Creativity occurs within a social context. As such, it is important to consider the environments which foster creative growth. Based on the observations of a small group of interpersonal women, the author describes some of the conditions which proved successful in facilitating the emergence of personal voice in writing. Many parallels surfaced between the appearance of voice in writing and the topic of creativity in general. Certain deeply felt aspects of creativity are difficult to uncover when the methods themselves do not include room for personal expression and response. Storytelling with group response might be a potential resource as yet undeveloped in creativity research.     

To Give a Surprise Exam,Use Game Theory

This paper proposes a game-theoretic solution of the surprise examination problem. It is argued that the game of “matching pennies” provides a useful model for the interaction of a teacher who wants her exam to be surprising and students who want to avoid being surprised. A distinction is drawn between prudential and evidential versions of the problem. In both, the teacher should not assign a probability of zero to giving the exam on the last day. This representation of the problem provides a diagnosis of where the backwards induction argument, which “proves” that no surprise exam is possible, is mistaken. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Making an Art of Creativity: The Cognitive Science of Duchamp and Dada

Dada is the infant terrible of art history, an anarchic movement that is typically referred to as nihilistic, pathological, and firmly enshrined within the modernist paradigm and the context of WWI. Through the lens of classical, romantic, and psychoanalytic notions, it certainly appears almost antithetical to creativity. Yet from a cognitive point-of-view, Dada marks a watershed in the understanding of creativity, and articulates principles of creative cognition with surprising insight and precision many decades ahead of science.     

Creativity in Three Samples of Photographers: A Validation of the Adjective Check List Creativity Scale

The creativity of photographers was investigated in three samples: photography students (n = 17), neophyte photographers (n = 46), and experienced photographers (n = 49). All participants completed the Adjective Check List (ACL), scored for Domino's creativity (Cr) scale; these scores were correlated with various indexes of creativity, including self- and peer-ratings, ratings of portfolios, and course grades. The findings support the validity of the ACL Cr scale as a measure of creativity.     

Creativity,Acceptance, and the Pause: A Case Example of Mindfulness and Art in Therapy with an Adolescent

ABSTRACT

Mindfulness, defined as nonjudgmental awareness, has been integrated into a variety of therapeutic approaches. The benefits of mindfulness for adults have been demonstrated, and mindful interventions for youth are increasing. Creating a space for mindfulness to arise can be challenging within the hectic and technology-filled lives adolescents often lead. Art in therapy with adolescents can be a beneficial way of creating a pause, thereby helping clients to connect to a mindful state. The use of art in therapy to promote mindfulness can be especially useful for adolescents who can be reluctant to engage in traditional forms of talk therapy. In this article, we use a case example of therapy with a Mexican-American male youth to exemplify the clinical application of a combination of mindfulness and various art modalities.     

Surprise is predicted by event probability,outcome valence,outcome meaningfulness,and gender

The present research was designed to better understand how the magnitude of experienced surprise is affected by both individual difference variables as well as variations in surprise-eliciting stimuli. Eighty-five participants played 5 versions of a slot machine-like game. The five games only differed with respect to the probability of winning each trial—10 % (i.e., wins were highly unusual), 30, 50, 70, and 90 % (i.e., losses were highly unusual). Players were given a fictitious “bankroll” at the beginning of each game and played up to 25 trials of each game. On each trial, players selected their wager amount, “pulled” the handle, learned the outcome (win or loss), and reported their surprise level using a 1 (none) to 9 (extremely) Likert scale. Replicating past research, results revealed that self-reported surprise was inversely related to outcome probability and that wins were rated as more surprising than losses, even when wins and losses occurred at the same level of probability. Novel results include finding that larger wagers predicted greater felt surprise (regardless of outcome), and that women reported greater surprise to both wins and losses than men.     

Creativity and dementia: a review

In these last years, creativity was found to play an important role for dementia patients in terms of diagnosis and rehabilitation strategies. This led us to explore the relationships between dementia and creativity. At the aim, artistic creativity and divergent thinking are considered both in non-artists and artists affected by different types of dementia. In general, artistic creativity can be expressed in exceptional cases both in Alzheimer's disease and Frontotemporal dementia, whereas divergent thinking decreases in dementia. The creation of paintings or music is anyway important for expressing emotions and well-being. Yet, creativity seems to emerge when the right prefrontal cortex, posterior temporal, and parietal areas are relatively intact, whereas it declines when these areas are damaged. However, enhanced creativity in dementia is not confirmed by controlled studies conducted in non-artists, and whether artists with dementia can show creativity has to be fully addressed. Future research directions are suggested.