The Creative Process and Emotions of Pupils in a Training Context with a Design Project

For many years, researchers have been investigating how the creative process occurs and what factors influence it. The scope of these studies is essential in the school context to enable pupils to develop their creativity and thus address the needs of the 21st century society. Although very rich, these studies are generally not situated in a real teaching and learning context. The output of the present research will make it possible to model, to better understand, and to identify the creative process in pupils as they design and produce utility objects in an educational and training context with ecological validity (real context of training). In the context of teaching Creative and Manual Activities in education, in the French part of Switzerland, we are focusing on observations of the creative process in line with psychology, didactics, and pedagogy. During their class, 22 pupils were invited to create a water fountain and, in parallel, to complete a Creative process Report Diary about the stages they do and the multivariate factors (cognitive, conative, emotional, and environmental factors) they mobilize at each lesson. Results presented the main frequent stages and factors at each lesson and we proposed a model describing the transitions between the stages and how the multivariate factors are involved in each stage. They illustrate what pupils actually do in a creative learning context.

Lay people's beliefs about creativity: evidence for an insight bias

Research finds that creative ideas are generated by two cognitive pathways: insight and persistence. However, emerging research suggests people's lay beliefs may not adequately reflect both routes. We propose that people exhibit an insight bias, such that they undervalue persistence and overvalue insight in the creative process.

Anna Freud's loom

'Anna Freud's Loom' examines Anna Freud's relationship to weaving. Adopting a form of weaverly thinking, I begin by offering an account of Anna Freud's work at the loom as recollected by her friend and colleague Manna Friedmann. I go on to describe how a metaphorics connected to weaving is often employed in psychoanalytic literature, especially in the writings of Sigmund Freud, which I situate in relationship to the Freud family's historical and personal relationship to textiles. The article then examines Anna Freud's use of weaving as a therapeutic tool and as a process akin to the work of mourning. For Anna Freud, weaving was, I suggest, a kind of grief-work.

Social Media Responses to the Pandemic: What Makes a Coronavirus Meme Creative

The current pandemic and the measures taken to address it, on a global scale, are unprecedented. Times of crisis call for creative solutions, and these are not reduced to the work of scientists or politicians. In everyday life, both in online and offline spaces, people use their creativity to make sense of the current situation, to cope with it, and to learn its lessons. Social media is a privileged space for mundane and participative creativity through the production and sharing of coronavirus Internet memes. In this article, we examine the creativity of such memes from a dedicated Reddit community. We ask, in particular, what makes a coronavirus meme creative and what this creativity tells us about the pandemic and popular understandings of it. To answer these questions, we use a triangulation of quantitative and qualitative methods by having 480 memes coded by three social media users for surprise, meaningfulness, elaboration, humor, and creativity and qualitatively analyzing those memes that score highly on each dimension. An interesting finding concerns the importance of elaboration and humor for the evaluation of creativity in the case of memes, above the more traditional criteria of surprise (proxy for novelty) and meaningfulness (proxy for appropriateness), perhaps a feature unique for Internet spaces. The article ends with reflections on what these findings tell us about creativity on social media more generally and the creative processes involved in the generation and reception of coronavirus memes in particular.

From da Vinci's Flying Machines to a Theory of the Creative Process

Steps involved in the creative process have been described in previous research, yet the exact nature of the process still remains unclear. In the current study, we take this investigation further, referring to two flying machines developed by Leonardo da Vinci and his other notes. Nine iterative steps are described with a focus on motivation and cognition: (a) vision and curiosity; (b) social recognition; (c) asking questions; (d) analogical thinking; (e) trial and error; (f) abductive reasoning; (g) incubation and forgetting; (h) overinclusive thinking, latent inhibition, and illumination; and (i) schema elaboration. The influence of da Vinci's socio-historic context is also briefly discussed. The analyses show how general psychological mechanisms can explain extraordinary acts of creativity. The steps discussed can be further formalized in future research to advance the modeling of creativity.

The Predictive Creative Mind: A First Look at Spontaneous Predictions and Evaluations During Idea Generation

Idea generation, the process of creating and developing candidate solutions that when implemented can solve ill-defined and complex problems, plays a pivotal role in creativity and innovation. The algorithms that underlie classical evolutionary, cognitive, and process models of idea generation, however, appear too inefficient to effectively help solve the ill-defined and complex problems for which one would engage in idea generation. To address this, these classical models have recently been redesigned as forward models, drawing heavily on the "predictive mind" literature. These pose that more efficiency can be achieved by making predictions based on heuristics, previous experiences, and domain knowledge about what material to use to generate ideas with, and evaluate these subsequently generated ideas based on whether they indeed match the initial prediction. When a discrepancy occurs between prediction and evaluation, new predictions are made, and thus shaping what actions, and how these actions, are undertaken. Although promising, forward models of idea generation remain theoretical and thus no empirical evidence exists about whether such predictions and evaluations indeed form part of the idea generation process. To take a first empirical look at this, a mixed-methods study was conducted by analyzing people's self-reports for the reasons of the actions that they take during an idea generation task. The results showed that predictions and evaluations are pervasive in the idea generation process. Specifically, switching between concept selection and conceptual combination and idea generation, as well as repeating idea generation based on earlier selected conceptual combination, and possibly (but to a lesser extent) concept selection and the repetition thereof, are likely to be driven by predictions and evaluations. Moreover, the frequencies of the predictions and evaluations that drive these actions influenced the amount of ideas generated, amount of concepts used, and within-concept fluency (the ratio of the amount of ideas generated per concept used). Therefore, the contribution of this paper is the first empirical evidence that indicates that the idea generation process is driven by both predictions and evaluations.

The Role of Metacognitive Components in Creative Thinking

Metacognition refers to the knowledge and regulation of one’s own cognitive processes, which has been regarded as a critical component of creative thinking. However, the current literature on the association between metacognition and creative thinking remains controversial, and the underlying role of metacognition in the creative process appears to be insufficiently explored and explained. This review focuses on the roles of three aspects of metacognition (i.e., metacognitive knowledge, metacognitive experience, and metacognitive monitoring and control) in creative thinking and offers a primary summary of the neurocognitive mechanisms that support metacognition during creative thinking. Future research is needed to explore the interactive effects of the metacognitive components on creative thinking and to elucidate the function of metacognition during different stages of the creative process.

[Therapeutic mediation through the self-portrait: examining the self through the eyes of others]

Art is used as a form of mediation in care units. In addition to its benefit as an occupational activity, it is rooted in the tangible which can help combat apragmatism and anxiety.While this practice helps patients give meaning to their existence, the group approach and the help of a therapist form part of personalised care projects. Work around the self-portrait is an illustration of this practice, between the occupational and the therapeutic.

[Art therapy, a care approach with several dimensions]

Art therapy is starting to find its place in psychiatric units. However, depending on the facility, it is seen either as an occupational activity, or as a real therapy. While, in both cases, art therapy provides a form of care, it is essential that it is carried out in specific conditions to be truly effective as part of a therapeutic project.

How Does Culture Shape Creativity? A Mini-Review

The purpose of this study was to examine how culture shapes creativity by reviewing empirical findings across diverse studies. The impact of culture on creativity is typically manifested in three ways: (1) people from different cultures or settings have distinct implicit and/or explicit conceptions of creativity; (2) individuals from different cultures, particularly those from individualist and collectivist cultures, show differences in preferred creative processes and creative processing modes (e.g., usefulness seems more important than novelty in the East, whereas novelty seems equally important as usefulness, if not more so, in the West) when they are engaged in creative endeavors; (3) creativity may be assessed using different measures based on culture-related contents or materials, and findings are accurate only when culturally appropriate or culturally fair measures are used. Potential implications and future directions are also proposed.

What Are the Stages of the Creative Process? What Visual Art Students Are Saying

Within the literature on creativity in the arts, some authors have focused on the description of the artistic process (Patrick, 1937; Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi, 1976; Mace and Ward, 2002; Yokochi and Okada, 2005) whereas others have focused on the creative process (Wallas, 1926; Osborn, 1953/1963; Runco and Dow, 1999; Howard et al., 2008). These two types of processes may be, however, somewhat distinct from each other because the creative process is not always dedicated to artistic creation, and productive work in the arts may not always involve creativity, in terms of specifically original thinking. Our goal is to identify the specific nature of the artistic creative process, to determine what are the basic stages of this kind of process. This description can then be integrated in a Creative process Report Diary (CRD; Botella et al., 2017) which allows self-observations in situ when participants are creating.

The Effect of Problem Construction on Team Process and Creativity

Although research on the benefits of problem construction within the creative process is expanding, research on team problem construction is limited. This study investigates the cognitive process of problem construction and identification at the team level through an experimental design. Furthermore, this study explores team social processes in relation to problem construction instructions. Using student teams solving a real-world problem, the results of this study revealed that teams that engaged in problem construction and identification generated more original ideas than teams that did not engage in such processes. Moreover, higher satisfaction and lower conflict was observed among groups that engaged in problem construction compared to groups that did not engage in problem construction. These findings highlight the utility of problem construction for teams engaging in creative problem-solving.

Exploring the Creative Process: Integrating Psychometric and Eye-Tracking Approaches

This exploratory study aims at integrating the psychometric approach to studying creativity with an eye-tracking methodology and thinking-aloud protocols to potentially untangle the nuances of the creative process. Wearing eye-tracking glasses, one hundred adults solved a drawing creativity test - The Test of Creative Thinking-Drawing Production (TCT-DP) - and provided spontaneous comments during this process. Indices of visual activity collected during the eye-tracking phase explained a substantial amount of variance in psychometric scores obtained in the test. More importantly, however, clear signs of methodological synergy were observed when all three sources (psychometrics, eye-tracking, and coded thinking-aloud statements) were integrated. The findings illustrate benefits of using a blended methodology for a more insightful analysis of creative processes, including creative learning and creative problem-solving.

Creative Processes in the Shaping of a Musical Interpretation: A Study of Nine Professional Musicians

Various studies have been conducted to understand the role of mental representation when musicians practice or perform music (Lehman and Ericsson, 1997; Sloboda, 2005) and the work steps required for a musician to prepare a concert (Chaffin et al., 2003). More recent studies examine creativity in the shaping of a musical interpretation (Lisboa et al., 2011; Payne, 2016; Barros et al., 2017; Wise et al., 2017). However, none of these studies answers the following questions: Why do expert musicians working from the same score create different musical interpretations? During individual practice sessions, what happens that allows each musician to produce significantly different interpretive results? To answer these questions, we instructed nine expert musicians to record their individual practice sessions, verbalize their actions and thoughts, and answer a self-reflection questionnaire. A third-party observer also described what happened during the practice sessions. We conducted interviews in order to gather additional information about the contents of the individual practice sessions; the musicians' usual work habits; and their beliefs, values, and ideas regarding the role of the musician in the creative process. Based on the methodology of Analyse par théorisation ancrée¹ (Paillé, 1994), we were able to take into account a diverse data set and identify aspects of the creative process that were specific to each individual as well as elements that all musicians shared. We found that the context in which the creative process takes place—the musician (e.g., his or her values and knowledge); the musical work (e.g., style, technical aspects, etc.); and the external constraints (e.g., deadlines, public expectations, etc.)—impacted the strategies used. The participants used reflection, extramusical supports, emotions, body reactions, intuition, and other tools to generate new musical ideas and evaluate the accuracy of their musical interpretations. We identified elements related to those already discussed in the literature, including the creative process as an alternation between divergent and convergent thinking (Guilford, 1950), creative associations (Lubart, 2015), and artistic appropriation (Héroux and Fortier, 2014; Héroux, 2016).

Making unformulated experience real through painting: Painting and psychoanalytic psychotherapy practice as two ways of making sense

I contend that painting, like psychoanalytic psychotherapy, is an intersubjective process able to connect hearts and minds of painters and viewers alike, because the creative process of making a painting brings painters into more complex and more animated relationship with themselves. My own painting process is largely nonverbal. Interactions between me and my evolving artwork-in-process reveal experiences, thoughts, and feelings not yet formulated in words, and so, not available explicitly to conscious awareness until visual representation allows questions of meaning and intention to be thought about and elaborated in the usual, verbal sense. I describe how my particular painting practice provides an experiential frame for the creative process of self-articulation that goes on in psychotherapy, as well as how the physical and mostly nonverbal dialogue experienced in the painting studio served as a source of listening attitudes and self-regulation in my work with a patient's inhibited self-expression and thwarted artistic ambitions.

What About Their Performance Do Free Jazz Improvisers Agree Upon? A Case Study

When musicians improvise freely together—not following any sort of script, predetermined harmonic structure, or “referent”—to what extent do they understand what they are doing in the same way as each other? And to what extent is their understanding privileged relative to outside listeners with similar levels of performing experience in free improvisation? In this exploratory case study, a saxophonist and a pianist of international renown who knew each other's work but who had never performed together before were recorded while improvising freely for 40 min. Immediately afterwards the performers were interviewed separately about the just-completed improvisation, first from memory and then while listening to two 5 min excerpts of the recording in order to prompt specific and detailed commentary. Two commenting listeners from the same performance community (a saxophonist and drummer) listened to, and were interviewed about, these excerpts. Some months later, all four participants rated the extent to which they endorsed 302 statements that had been extracted from the four interviews and anonymized. The findings demonstrate that these free jazz improvisers characterized the improvisation quite differently, selecting different moments to comment about and with little overlap in the content of their characterizations. The performers were not more likely to endorse statements by their performing partner than by a commenting listener from the same performance community, and their patterns of agreement with each other (endorsing or dissenting with statements) across multiple ratings—their interrater reliability as measured with Cohen's kappa—was only moderate, and not consistently higher than their agreement with the commenting listeners. These performers were more likely to endorse statements about performers' thoughts and actions than statements about the music itself, and more likely to endorse evaluatively positive than negative statements. But these kinds of statements were polarizing; the performers were more likely to agree with each other in their ratings of statements about the music itself and negative statements. As in Schober and Spiro (2014), the evidence supports a view that fully shared understanding is not needed for joint improvisation by professional musicians in this genre and that performing partners can agree with an outside listener more than with each other.