Creators and Presses: The Person–Situation Interaction in Negative Creativity

The Effect of Parenting Practices on Creativity: Mediating Role of Psychological Resilience

Aim

This study aimed to investigate the relationship between parenting practices and creativity (both general and malignant creativity) in a representative sample of college students in China, and to explore the potential mediating role of resilience.

Methods

The study was conducted among 1201 Chinese college students who completed questionnaires on parenting practices, creativity, and resilience. The parenting practices were assessed using the short-form Egna Minnen av Barndoms Uppfostran for Chinese, while creativity was measured using the Malevolent Creativity Behavior Scale and the Runco Ideational Behavior Scale. The Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale was used to assess resilience.

Results

The results showed that parental warmth had a positive correlation with general creativity, but a negative correlation with malevolent creativity. In contrast, parental rejection and over-protection had a negative correlation with general creativity, but a positive correlation with malevolent creativity. Furthermore, resilience fully mediated the relationship between emotional warmth, rejection, and general creativity, and partially mediated the relationship between over-protection and general creativity and between all parenting practices and malevolent creativity.

Conclusion

These findings suggest that parenting practices have a significant impact on creativity, and the type of creativity manifested may depend on the specific parenting practices. Additionally, the study highlights the importance of resilience as a potential mediator in the relationship between parenting practices and creativity. The implications of these findings for parenting practices and interventions to foster creativity and resilience are discussed.

The evil within: The AMORAL model of dark creativity

The dark side of creativity entails using original thought to meet a selfish, negative, or evil goal, with or without the deliberate intent to harm others. Recent empirical advances have studied the behavioral correlates of such creativity, including associations with aggression, deception, and subclinical psychopathy. The time, therefore, seems apt to propose a theoretical framework for dark creativity’s development and manifestation. This article outlines the AMORAL model of dark creativity, which traces a creative action from its Antecedents to Mechanisms and Operants to its Realization, and to the subsequent Aftereffects and Legacy of the act. We use both real-life and simulated examples to illustrate the application of the theory across multiple domains, from law enforcement to interpersonal relationships. Our goal is to help guide future scholarship and measurement.

Creative, Antagonistic, and Angry? Exploring the Roots of Malevolent Creativity with a Real-World Idea Generation Task

Research is currently witnessing more investigations into malevolent creativity—creativity that is used to intentionally harm others. Inspired by previous methods to measure malevolent creativity, in the present study, we introduce a real‐world behavioral task designed to capture individuals’ capacity for using creativity for the purpose of attaining malevolent goals in response to everyday, provocative situations. In a sample of 105 students, we found malevolent creativity positively correlated with fluency in conventional creative ideation, as well as with self‐reported typical malevolent creativity behavior in daily life. Moreover, performance on the malevolent creativity task showed positive correlations with the maladaptive personality trait of antagonism (PID‐5) as well as individuals’ state anger at the beginning of the experiment. Further, our multiple regression analysis revealed that conventional creative ideation, antagonistic personality, and state anger all explained unique, non‐overlapping variance in the capacity for implementing malevolent creativity. As a whole, these findings suggest that different cognitive and affective factors, along with specific personality traits may each contribute to the expression of malevolent creativity in distinct ways. Future investigations striving to further decode the destructive potential of individuals toward others may benefit from this validated behavioral measurement approach to malevolent creativity.