Effects of Creative Personality on EEG Alpha Oscillation: Based on the Social and General Creativity Comparative Study

The neural mechanism underlying creativity has been identified and confirmed by numerous studies. This current exploratory study compared the neural basis between social creativity and general creativity and explored the effect of creative personality on their neural basis by employing multiple regression analysis. The EEG activities of 34 participants were recorded during social or general creative tasks. The results indicated that a stronger alpha event‐related synchronization (ERS) was presented during the social creative task than during the general creative task. High creative personality individuals were found to exhibit higher event‐related desynchronization (ERD) only for the upper alpha band. Additionally, high creative personality individuals revealed no significant task differences regarding the alpha ERS. However, low creative personality individuals exhibited a stronger alpha ERS for social creative tasks than they did for general creative tasks. The current investigation could lead to new approaches for examining the brain correlates of creativity from different domains and their correlations with respect to creative personality.