Mapping Dimensions of Creativity in the Life-Space

Generative artificial intelligence, human creativity, and art

Recent artificial intelligence (AI) tools have demonstrated the ability to produce outputs traditionally considered creative. One such system is text-to-image generative AI (e.g. Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, DALL-E), which automates humans' artistic execution to generate digital artworks. Utilizing a dataset of over 4 million artworks from more than 50,000 unique users, our research shows that over time, text-to-image AI significantly enhances human creative productivity by 25% and increases the value as measured by the likelihood of receiving a favorite per view by 50%. While peak artwork Content Novelty, defined as focal subject matter and relations, increases over time, average Content Novelty declines, suggesting an expanding but inefficient idea space. Additionally, there is a consistent reduction in both peak and average Visual Novelty, captured by pixel-level stylistic elements. Importantly, AI-assisted artists who can successfully explore more novel ideas, regardless of their prior originality, may produce artworks that their peers evaluate more favorably. Lastly, AI adoption decreased value capture (favorites earned) concentration among adopters. The results suggest that ideation and filtering are likely necessary skills in the text-to-image process, thus giving rise to "generative synesthesia"-the harmonious blending of human exploration and AI exploitation to discover new creative workflows.

COVID-19 Lockdown and Creativity: Exploring the Role of Emotions and Motivation on Creative Activities From the Chinese and German Perspectives

For much of 2020, countries around the world fought against the COVID-19 pandemic. Many countries went into lockdown to control the fast spread of the virus. The unusual restrictions and confinement of the lockdown brought about new challenges for people's everyday lives. With flexibility, adaptability, and problem-solving at the core of its nature, creativity has the potential to help people cope with harsh and uncertain circumstances. Were people more, the same, or less creative in their everyday life during the period of lockdown, and in which ways? What are the emotions and motivations underlying their creative or non-creative behaviors? The current study aims to explore these questions from a cross-cultural perspective. A total of 754 comparable employee samples from three Chinese and three German cities were asked about their moods during the lockdown period, their self-rated level of creativity in daily lives before and during the lockdown, and their motivations behind their creative activities. Significant increases in creativity were observed in all everyday activities in both countries with only two exceptions in the German sample. Despite minor differences, a common pattern was found across cultures: whereas the activating positive mood could directly lead to the increase in creativity in some everyday activities, such a direct Mood-Creativity link was limited in the activating negative mood circumstances. In such circumstances, motivation intervened to enable the link to creativity. It was also found that this indirect effect of motivation between mood and creativity was more pronounced with the German participants.

How Is Intelligence Test Performance Associated with Creative Achievement? A Meta-Analysis

This paper presents a meta-analysis of the links between intelligence test scores and creative achievement. A three-level meta-analysis of 117 correlation coefficients from 30 studies found a correlation of r = .16 (95% CI: .12, .19), closely mirroring previous meta-analytic findings. The estimated effects were stronger for overall creative achievement and achievement in scientific domains than for correlations between intelligence scores and creative achievement in the arts and everyday creativity. No signs of publication bias were found. We discuss theoretical implications and provide recommendations for future studies.

Creative Lockdown? A Daily Diary Study of Creative Activity During Pandemics

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is influencing our lives in an enormous and unprecedented way. Here, we explore COVID-19-lockdown's consequences for creative activity. To this end, we relied on two extensive diary studies. The first, held on March 2019 (pre-pandemic), involved 78 students who reported their emotions and creativity over 2 weeks (927 observations). The second, conducted on March 2020 (during the pandemic and lockdown), involved 235 students who reported on their emotions, creativity, and the intensity of thinking and talking about COVID-19 over a month (5,904 observations). We found that compared with 2019, during the lockdown, students engaged slightly yet statistically significantly more in creative activities. An analysis of diaries collected during the pandemic also showed that the days when students spent more time discussing or searching for information about COVID-19 were characterized by a higher creative activity yet also mixed emotions. We discuss potential explanations of these unexpected results along with future study directions.

The effects of risk-taking, exploitation, and exploration on creativity

The purpose of this paper was to investigate the effects of risk-taking, exploitation, and exploration on creativity by taking a model-based computational approach to both divergent and convergent thinking as primary ingredients of creativity. We adopted a reinforcement learning framework of Q learning to provide a simple, rigorous account of behavior in the decision-making process and examined the determinants of divergent and convergent thinking. Our findings revealed that risk-taking has positive effects on divergent thinking, but not related to convergent thinking. In particular, divergent thinkers with a high learning capacity were more likely to engage in risk-taking when facing losses than when facing gains. This risk-taking behavior not only contributes to the rapid achievement of learning convergence, but is also associated with high performance in divergent thinking tasks. Conversely, both exploitation and exploration had no significant effects on creativity once these risk attitudes were considered. Moreover, while convergent thinking relied on personality characteristics, it was not associated with risk-taking, exploitation, or exploration.

Self-Expressive Creativity in the Adolescent Digital Domain: Personality, Self-Esteem, and Emotions

Background: Although self-expressive creativity is related to cyberbullying, it can also reinforce strengths that contribute to positive adolescent development. Our study concentrated on the relationships between personality traits and self-expressive creativity in the digital domain in an adolescent population. For this, we analyzed the effect of self-esteem and emotional intelligence as assets for positive development related to personality traits and self-expressive creativity. Methods: The study population included a total of 742 adolescents that were high-school students in the province of Almería, Spain. The following instruments were used: Big Five Inventory (BFI) to evaluate the five broad personality factors, Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSE), Expression, Management, and Emotion Recognition Evaluation Scale (TMMS-24), and the Creative Behavior Questionnaire: Digital (CBQD). Results: The cluster analysis revealed the existence of two profiles of adolescents based on their personality traits. The analysis showed that the group with the highest levels of extraversion and openness to experience and lowest levels of neuroticism were those who showed the highest scores in self-esteem, clarity, and emotional repair, as well as in self-expressive creativity. Higher scores in neuroticism and lower scores in extraversion and openness to experience showed a direct negative effect on self-expressive creativity and indirect effect through self-esteem and emotional attention, which acted as mediators in series. Conclusions: To counteract certain characteristics that increase adolescents’ vulnerability to social network bullying, a plan must be developed for adequate positive use of the Internet from a creative model that enables digital self-expression for acquiring identity and self-efficacy through the positive influence of peers, which promotes feelings of empowerment and self-affirmation through constructive tasks that reinforce self-esteem and emotional intelligence.

The link between hypomania risk and creativity: The role of heightened behavioral activation system (BAS) sensitivity

BACKGROUND

The relationship between bipolar disorder (BD) and creativity is well-known; however, relatively little is known about its potential mechanism. We investigated whether heightened behavioral activation system (BAS) sensitivity may mediate such relationship.

METHODS

Korean young adults (N=543) completed self-report questionnaires that included the Hypomanic Personality Scale (HPS), the Behavioral Activation System(BAS) Scale, the Everyday Creativity Scale (ECS), the Positive Affect and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS), and the Altman Self-Rating Mania Scale (ASRM). Correlational, hierarchical regression and mediation analyses using bootstrap confidence intervals were conducted.

RESULTS

As predicted, BAS sensitivity was associated with self-reported creativity as well as hypomania risk and symptoms. Even when positive affect was controlled, BAS sensitivity predicted incrementally significant variance in explaining creativity. In mediation analysis, BAS sensitivity partially mediated the relation between hypomania risk and creativity.

LIMITATIONS

Reliance on self-report measures in assessing creativity and usage of non-clinical sample.

CONCLUSIONS

BAS sensitivity was related not only to mood pathology but also to creativity. As a basic affective temperament, BAS sensitivity may help explain incompatible sides of adaptation associated with BD.

The Risky Side of Creativity: Domain Specific Risk Taking in Creative Individuals

Risk taking is often associated with creativity, yet little evidence exists to support this association. The present article aimed to systematically explore this association. In two studies, we investigated the relationship between five different domains of risk taking (financial, health and safety, recreational, ethical and social) and five different measures of creativity. Results from the first (laboratory-based) offline study suggested that creativity is associated with high risk taking tendencies in the social domain but not the other domains. Indeed, in the second study conducted online with a larger and diverse sample, the likelihood of social risk taking was the strongest predictor of creative personality and ideation scores. These findings illustrate the necessity to treat creativity and risk taking as multi-dimensional traits and the need to have a more nuanced framework of creativity and other related cognitive functions.

Openness to Experience and Intellect Differentially Predict Creative Achievement in the Arts and Sciences

The Big Five personality dimension Openness/Intellect is the trait most closely associated with creativity and creative achievement. Little is known, however, regarding the discriminant validity of its two aspects-Openness to Experience (reflecting cognitive engagement with perception, fantasy, aesthetics, and emotions) and Intellect (reflecting cognitive engagement with abstract and semantic information, primarily through reasoning)-in relation to creativity. In four demographically diverse samples totaling 1,035 participants, we investigated the independent predictive validity of Openness and Intellect by assessing the relations among cognitive ability, divergent thinking, personality, and creative achievement across the arts and sciences. We confirmed the hypothesis that whereas Openness predicts creative achievement in the arts, Intellect predicts creative achievement in the sciences. Inclusion of performance measures of general cognitive ability and divergent thinking indicated that the relation of Intellect to scientific creativity may be due at least in part to these abilities. Lastly, we found that Extraversion additionally predicted creative achievement in the arts, independently of Openness. Results are discussed in the context of dual-process theory.

Personality and Self-Perceptions of Creativity across Domains

The current study evaluated the structure of a revised (shortened) version of the Creativity Domain Questionnaire (CDQ), examined its relationship with five personality factors, and analyzed potential differences in creativity domains based upon gender and occupational status. One hundred eighty-two students and 60 warehouse employees completed the Revised Creativity Domain Questionnaire (CDQ-R) and the Big Five Factor Markers. Consistent with an exploratory factor analysis of pilot data, a subsequent confirmatory factor analysis of these data supported a four-factor structure for the CDQ-R. Correlations between these four creativity domains and the Big Five personality factors generally were consistent with theoretical expectations. Effects for gender also were consistent with theory. Women perceived themselves as more creative in the Arts general domain while men perceived themselves significantly more creative in Math/Science. There were no effects for occupational status.

Creativity takes place in diverse contexts, and we cannot expect the personalities of people who create in different domains to be the same, or to differ in the same ways from comparison subjects. (Helson, 1996, p. 303)