Recent trends in Creativity.
What is Creativity? - Creativity is defined as the tendency to generate or recognize
ideas, alternatives, or possibilities that may be useful in solving problems,
communicating with others, and entertaining ourselves and others
According to cognitive psychologists, creativity is a special kind of problem-solving
experience, which involves the activation of two opposite but complementary
mental processes, convergent thinking and divergent thinking, as well as insight.
Creativity as an insight problem experience is a mainly unexplored phenomenon
which has attracted increasing scholarly interest in the last two decades ranging
from cognitive psychology and sociology to cognitive linguistics and literary
studies.
Compared to the number of articles in the American literature, creativity is a
relatively neglected topic in psychological/educational research and theory in
Western Europe. There are no scientific creativity schools or research centres;
progress depends more or less on the personal interest of researchers in
creativity, leading to studies and papers which are scarce and dispersed in
national (sometimes international) journals. To a high degree this work has been
stimulated and influenced by developments in American creativity research in the
fifties and sixties. Nevertheless, apart from the American oriented work there is a
more or less typical European line of creativity research and theory
Creativity and innovative thinking have been a vast construct of questioning to
scholars, psychologists, therapists and, more lately, neuroscientists (Jung et al.,
2010). Creativity appears in various diverse models, tones, and shades. The
creative contributions of extraordinary artists, designers, inventors, and scientists
attract our greatest consideration as they express the foundations of their culture
and provide breakthroughs influencing cultural development and progress.
Therefore, creativity is a crucial operator of human progress.
There are several researches which show us how certain acts of creativity help
humans in many ways.
1-
Drawing improves children's moods by helping to distract them,
find researchers at Brooklyn College and Boston College. Scientists induced
a negative mood in 83 children — 43 who were ages 6 to 8 and 40 who
were ages 10 to 12 — by having them recall a disappointing episode in their
lives. Then, the youngsters drew either a scene related to the disappointing
episode (the venting condition) or a neutral scene unrelated to it (the
distraction condition). The children rated their moods both before and after
the drawing activity. The researchers found that the children's short-term
moods improved more in the distraction condition than in the venting
condition. The researchers also examined whether distraction would have a
stronger effect for younger than older children, given that younger kids
report that they enjoy drawing more and see themselves as drawing more
competently than older children. However, the "distraction" effect applied
equally to both younger and older children, the team found (Cognition and
Emotion, April 2013).
2-
Happiness and creativity go hand in hand, find researchers at the
University of North Carolina at Greensboro. The scientists randomly
sampled the feelings and actions of 79 young adults over a week using
automated cellphone surveys. People reported doing something creative
around 20 percent of the time, and those who generally reported feeling
happy and active were much more likely to be doing something creative in
a given moment, such as making up their own recipes, writing, playing
music or drawing. In addition, those who scored higher in openness to
experience were much more likely to spend time on creative activities than
others. The findings support a theory that everyday creative behavior is
both a cause and an effect of positive psychological processes, according to
the researchers (Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, online,
Feb. 10).
3-

Whether you brood or actively reflect helps determine whether you
slump into depression or jump into creativity, finds a study led by a
Georgia Institute of Technology scientist. In testing 244 college students,
researchers examined how two types of self-focused rumination —
brooding as opposed to self-reflective pondering, or purposefully turning
inward to consider your life more analytically — were related to creativity
or depressed mood. Brooding was linked to depressed mood but not to
creativity, the team found. Self-reflective pondering was linked to creativity
and not to depressed mood. The study provides further insight on a
previous finding that rumination is a common denominator of creative
behavior and depression (Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts,
online, Feb. 10).
People with different subtypes of bipolar disorder report similarly high levels of
creativity during manic or hypomanic episodes, though they differ somewhat in
the types of creative enterprises they seek out, finds a study by investigators at
the University of New South Wales. The team compared self-reported creativity
and illness patterns among 219 participants diagnosed with either bipolar I
disorder or bipolar II disorder, which encompasses less severe mania (hypomania)
than bipolar I disorder but involves more severe depression. Eighty-four percent
of bipolar I patients reported being creative during a manic episode, compared
with 81 percent of bipolar II patients during a hypomanic episode. In a subset of
69 participants, both subtypes reported greater creativity in writing, painting and
work or business ideas, but bipolar II patients were more likely to draw and be
musical. In addition, patients who said they had creative highs were significantly
more likely to report creative personality styles in general (Journal of Affective
Disorders, December 2013).

People with different patterns of emotion regulation prefer different types of
artistic subject matter, find researchers at the University of Rome–Sapienza.
Scientists divided 100 adults into two groups, one that scored high and the other
low on measures of alexithymia, a subclinical difficulty in experiencing, expressing
and describing emotions. The participants were asked to evaluate 20 works of art
on cognitive, emotional and aesthetic dimensions. Low-alexithymic participants
preferred pictures showing excitation, such as Francesco Hayez's "The Kiss,"
which depicts a couple in a passionate embrace. High-alexithymic individuals
were more likely to appreciate emotionally contained subjects, such as Edward
Hopper's "Railroad Sunset," which features a dark, empty railroad depot against a
stark though colorful sunset. The results indicate the need to include measures of
emotional regulation in a comprehensive model of aesthetic experience, the
researchers say (Creativity Research Journal, July 2013).

Acting classes may help people avoid unhealthy emotional behaviors and adopt
healthy ones, find two reports on the same study by researchers at Boston
College. In one report, 28 adolescents who majored in acting at a performing arts
high school engaged less in "expression suppression" — inhibiting their emotional
expression in a way research shows is unhealthy over the long term — than 25
peers who majored in the visual arts or music. Meanwhile, 35 elementary schoolage children were less likely to suppress emotional expression after 10 months of
acting than 40 peers in a visual-arts class (Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and
the Arts, May 2013). An earlier report on the same study showed that the teens in
acting classes improved both in empathy and in theory of mind — the ability to
gauge others' intentional states, including whether they are different from your
own — after a year of acting classes, and younger acting students gained in
empathy. Peers in both age groups who took visual arts or music classes showed
no such gains. The findings provide evidence that plasticity in empathy and theory
of mind is possible long after what are considered the watershed ages of 3 to 4
years, the authors write (Journal of Cognition and Development, online, Nov. 14,
2011).

Teens involved in after-school arts activities scored higher on depressive
symptoms than those who were not involved in after-school arts, squaring with
findings showing relatively high rates of mental illness in adult artists, find
researchers at Boston College. In their sample of 2,482 15- and 16-year-olds, the
researchers found a link between arts involvement and depression scores only in
teens with working memory scores above the median. It has been proposed that
shared cognitive traits — for example the failure to habituate normally to
excessive stimuli, which in turn can lead to a sense of cognitive overload — may
underlie both a propensity to practice art and associated mental illness. Strong
working memory, as found in teens who are both involved in art and show
depressive symptoms, may facilitate the adaptive use of these cognitive traits by
allowing people to use additional information to produce meaningful artistic or
creative products, the researchers note (Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and
the Arts, May 2013).