Domain Specificity and the Limits of Creativity Theory

A growing body of research evidence suggests that creativity is very domain‐specific and that domain‐general skills or traits contribute little to creative performance. The term “creativity” is a convenient term for collecting many interesting artifacts, processes, and people into a single category, and the term “creative thinking skills” may be a useful way to connect a diverse set of unrelated cognitive processes that operate on different content and in different domains. These concepts are misleading, however, because although they connect things that may seem similar to observers, they lack any underlying cognitive psychological validity. This has implications for the ways we understand and assess creativity, and also for how we should direct our efforts to develop creative‐thinking skills in diverse domains. Creativity training needs either to target the domains in which creativity enhancement is desired or to use a wide range of activities in diverse domains if the goal is more general improvement in many domains. Creativity assessment needs to focus on domain‐by‐domain assessment and to review findings based on allegedly domain‐general tests of creativity that may have misled researchers to unsupportable interpretations. Creativity theory needs to set more modest goals of domain‐by‐domain theory development and to recognize that theories that may seem domain‐general might better be understood as meta‐theoretical heuristics that do not actually describe domain‐general processes. These meta‐theories might in some cases help guide the search for domain‐based theories.     

Creative Activity,Personality, Mental Illness,and Short‐Term Mating Success

It has been argued that creativity evolved, at least in part, through sexual selection to attract mates. Recent research lends support to this view and has also demonstrated a link between certain dimensions of schizotypy, creativity, and short‐term mating. The current study delves deeper into these relationships by focusing on engagement in creative activity and employing an expansive set of personality and mental health measures (Five Factor Model, schizotypy, anxiety, and depression). A general tendency to engage in everyday forms of creative activity was related to number of sexual partners within the past year in males only. Furthermore, schizotypy, anxiety, and Neuroticism were all indirectly related to short‐term mating success, again for males only. The study provides additional support for predictions made by sexual selection theory that men have a higher drive for creative display, and that creativity is linked with higher short‐term mating success. The study also provides support for the contention that certain forms of mental illness may still exist in the gene pool because particular personality traits associated with milder forms of mental illness (i.e., Neuroticism & schizotypy) are also associated directly with creativity and indirectly with short‐term mating success.     

Leader Positivity and Follower Creativity: An Experimental Analysis

Using an experimental research design, 191 working adults were randomly assigned to two experimental conditions in order to test a theoretical model linking leader and follower positive psychological capital (PsyCap). Multiple methods were used to gather information from the participants. We found when leader PsyCap was manipulated experimentally, it was positively related to follower PsyCap. Subsequently, follower PsyCap was significantly related to employee's originality of ideas; one important component of creativity in the workplace. We discuss the theoretical contributions of linking leader and follower PsyCap in what emerges as a directional contagion effect, and the mediating role of follower PsyCap in enhancing follower creative task performance. Further, employee selection and development as well as leadership development practical implications are discussed. We conclude with a discussion of limitations and future research directions.     

Perfectionism: The good,the bad,and the creative

The influence of adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism on creativity was examined. Initially, six measures of creativity were administered, including creative self-perceptions, behavior, and performance measures. Adaptive perfectionism was weakly positively related to creativity, whereas maladaptive perfectionism was unrelated to creativity across five of the six measures. A follow-up study assessed whether initial findings could be generalized to an everyday problem-solving task. Results indicated that adaptive perfectionism was related to higher quality but not originality of solutions. Further, a curvilinear relationship in the shape of an inverted “U” occurred between adaptive perfectionism and four of eight creativity measures. Overall, adaptive perfectionism was consistently, albeit weakly, related to creativity across various types of measures, whereas maladaptive perfectionism was not related to creativity.     

Minimally Creative Thought

Creativity has received, and continues to receive, comparatively little analysis in philosophy and the brain and behavioural sciences. This is in spite of the importance of creative thought and action, and the many and varied resources of theories of mind. Here an alternative approach to analyzing creativity is suggested: start from the bottom up with minimally creative thought. Minimally creative thought depends non‐accidentally upon agency, is novel relative to the acting agent, and could not have been tokened before the time it is in fact tokened, relative to the agent in question. Thoughts that meet these three conditions—agency, psychological novelty, and modal—are what may be called cognitive breakthroughs. Even if such breakthroughs are not necessary to or definitive of richer creativity, they are indeed central to much of creativity. The minimal analysis provides a more workable explanandum for theories of creativity of varied motivation and method.     

社会创造性的微观变化：基于虚拟仿真技术的研究

本研究将微观发生法设计和虚拟仿真技术相结合,考察了不同特质社会创造性大学生跨情境、跨时间的状态社会创造性的变化特点。结果表明：（1）在四种具体社会问题情境中,个体策略新颖性的变化表现出了跨情境的多样性特点,而策略实用性的变化则主要表现出了跨情境的一致性特点;（2）个体特质社会创造性对其状态社会创造性的表现的影响主要体现在策略的实用性上。     

The impact of a rural or urban context in eating awareness and self‐regulation strategies in children and adolescents from eight European countries

Complex relationships exist between eating behaviour and personal and environmental factors. Rural and urban geographic contexts seem to play a role in eating behaviour, and therefore deserve a deeper study. A healthy eating behaviour and the conditions that promote it are a major issue in the promotion of adolescent health. The study aims to investigate the associations between the area of residence (urban vs. rural), self‐regulation strategies (TESQ‐E) and eating behaviours among children and adolescents. A total of 11,820 adolescents (50.6% girls) participated in the study, with a mean age of 13.30 years (SD= 2.13). Nine countries (The Netherlands, United Kingdom, Poland, Portugal, Denmark, Romania, Germany, Finland and Belgium) completed a questionnaire in the school context, asking about the use of self‐regulation strategies, eating behaviour awareness/care and sociodemographic questions such as age, gender and residential area. Both areas of residence (urban vs. rural) are associated with eating awareness/care in Romania and Portugal, controlling for age, gender and self‐regulation strategies. In some European countries at least, and most probably around the world, health promotion should focus on an ecological approach that includes the understanding of the effect of both environmental factors and personal skills on eating behaviour/awareness.     

Creative Imagination is Stable Across Technological Media: The Spore Creature Creator Versus Pencil and Paper

T. B. Ward (1994) investigated creativity by asking participants to draw alien creatures that they imagined to be from a planet very different from Earth. He found that participant drawings reliably contained features typical of common Earth animals. As a consequence, Ward concluded that creativity is structured. The present investigation predicts that this limitation on creativity is not restricted to drawings: the use of different technology will not change creative output. To investigate this question, participants performed Ward's task twice: once using pencil and paper and once using software made to design creatures (the Spore Creature Creator). Only minor significant differences were found. This preliminarily suggests that changing tools does not affect the overall rigidity of the creative process. This lends further support to Ward's thesis on the structural rigidity of creativity. We conclude by suggesting an elaboration to Ward's thesis that will be explored in future work. We suggest that aesthetics might be one of the factors that contribute to creative constraint, in that creatures that are too unusual would be less interesting.     

Mind,Machine, and Creativity: An Artist's Perspective

Harold Cohen is a renowned painter who has developed a computer program, AARON, to create art. While AARON has been hailed as one of the most creative AI programs, Cohen consistently rejects the claims of machine creativity. Questioning the possibility for AI to model human creativity, Cohen suggests in so many words that the human mind takes a different route to creativity, a route that privileges the relational, rather than the computational, dimension of cognition. This unique perspective on the tangled web of mind, machine, and creativity is explored by an application of three relational models of the mind to an analysis of Cohen's talks and writings, which are available on his website: www.aaronshome.com .     

Factors related to life satisfaction among urban African American adults receiving care at a publicly-funded sexual health clinic

Life satisfaction is linked to premature morbidity and mortality and it may be compromised for individuals living in economically-disadvantaged, urban neighborhoods. The present study explores how behavioral and social-environmental health factors are associated with life satisfaction among a sample of African American young adults. Participants (N = 307, M_age = 26.6 years, 53% male) were recruited from a publicly-funded clinic for a randomized controlled trial (RCT). Data from the baseline assessment of the RCT, which included measures of sleep, depression, anxiety, social support, alcohol and drug use problems, city stress, and life satisfaction, were used for the current study. Correlation analyses assessed bivariate associations between life satisfaction and the demographic and health-related factors. Linear regression using backward elimination determined the best fitting model of factors associated with life satisfaction. Backward elimination resulted in the following variables remaining as significantly associated with life satisfaction: age (b = ?2.40, p = .017), anxiety (b = ?5.32, p < .001), and social support (b = 2.89, p = .004). Feeling rested upon waking also remained in the best fitting model, although this association did not achieve statistical significance (p = .099). The results suggest that African American adults who are younger, less anxious, and report adequate social support are more likely to report satisfaction with life. These findings add to the literature aimed at examining health and social factors impacting the well-being of African Americans living in low-income, urban communities.