Time for Psychology: Creativity

Using creativity as a vehicle through which one derives pleasure, satisfaction, and a sense of well-being is quite common. Every day, people around the world are engaged in hobbies, crafts and amateur performances in the arts.

What is Creativity?

Creativity is one of those qualities that is enormously difficult to pin down. One criterion is that it seems to be a process that produces novel response that contribute to the solution of problem. Creativity refers to the phenomenon where by a person creates something new (a product, solution, artwork, literary work, joke, etc.) that has some kind of value. What counts as "new" may be in reference to the individual creator, or to the society or domain within which the novelty occurs. What counts as "valuable" is similarly defined in a variety of ways. Creativity has been pegged to conducive environments, perfect collaborators, personality traits, serendipity, and even spiritual muses.

When people speak of someone being creativity, they can mean anything from an unexpected and unusual use of mulch in a vegetable, to a clever new ad campaign for diaper or a breakthrough in fiction that transforms the way the world looks at literature.

The Basic Type of Creativity

Psychologist distinguish two types of creativity.

1. Process creativity. It is refers to a personal and somewhat more psychological type of creativity. It is associated with increased openness to experiences, awillingness to accept and even relish change, the ability to improvise and adapt quickly tosituations, and a greater that average ability to think in unexpected directions.

2. Product creativity is what most people think of when they use the term creativity. It is the process of finding highly original and inventive solutions to problems. Most of the psychological research on creativity has focused on product creativity.

Frank Barron (1988) has called into question the sharp distinction between product and process creativity. He suggest that the relationship between persons and products or problems is more akin to an “open system” where the two are “mutually interdependent” on each other.

Tardif and Robert Sterberg (1988) also note that one quality of creative people is “what seems almost to be an aesthetic ability that allows such individuals to recognize ‘good’ problems in their field and apply themselves to these problems while ignoring others”. Creative people seem to sense where the “fit” will be between their talents and the problems that are just waiting for a creative solution.

The Measurement of Creativity

Lubart and Sternberg study was that creativity in one domain, such as art, was only moderately associated with creativity in a different domain, such as writing. The confluence approach to creativity assumes that multiple factors need to be in place in order for real creativity to occur. The confluence proposed by Lubart ans Sternberg (1995) states that six resources need to work together in creativity: intellectual abilities, knowledge, personality traits, a motivational style, thinking styles, and an environment that is supportive of the creative process and creative output.

Building on Guilford's work, Torrance developed the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking in 1966. They involved simple tests of divergent thinking and other problem-solving skills, which were scored on:

Fluency – The total number of interpretable, meaningful and relevant ideas generated in response to the stimulus.

Originality – The statistical rarity of the responses among the test subjects.

Elaboration – The amount of detail in the responses.

The Creative Person

First, most of the characteristics of creative people overlap with the characteristics of people who achieve excellence. Creative people are intensely interested in their field and willing to work hard and work for a long time. Creativity generally takes time. People work to find solutions and must often wait for insight and practical solutions to problems. Creative people is the people have better problem solving, they have average IQ. Creative people seem to be expert in their field as well as creative within it. Gardner (1993) found that creative people are often productive in some way every day.

Other personality characteristics that have been associated with creativity include receptivity, sensitivity to problems, fluency in thinking, and a willingness to take risks. Therisa Amabile (1983) summarized many of these qualities into three major ch aracteristics of creative persons. First, they are experts in the chosen field or artistic medium. Second, they posses and utilize the cognitive skills and personality characteristics that have been mentioned earlier. Third, they are intrinsically motivated.

Now, there it the ways to stay creative.