The Effect of Intrinsic Motivation on the Affect and Evaluation of the Creative Process Among Fine Arts Students

The main aim of this study was to gain a deeper understanding of the effect of intrinsic motivation on affect, subjective evaluation, and the creative process of young artists. Relations between motivation, affect, and evaluation were treated as a dynamic process and measured several times. The unique contribution of this study is that it concerned not only the effect of intrinsic motivation on the final result of creativity, but also changes in subjective evaluation and affect of the intermediate results at consecutive stages of the creative process. Thirty-six female fine arts students participated in the experiment. The creative task (collage making) was sampled on 3 occasions: after 5 min, 10 min, and at the end of the activity. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations were induced by 2 types of instruction. The creative products were assessed by 13 judges in accordance with the consensual assessment technique. Intrinsically motivated art students experienced significantly higher levels of positive affect in the creative process and evaluated their performance significantly higher than extrinsically motivated students. The distribution of collage creativity scores suggests that there may be a complex effect of motivation on creativity among fine arts students. The study sheds new light on the effect of intrinsic motivation on evaluation, affect and product creativity.