A dimensional analysis of creativity and mental illness: Do anxiety and depression symptoms predict creative cognition, creative accomplishments, and creative self-concepts?

The link, if any, between creativity and mental illness is one of the most controversial topics in modern creativity research. The present research assessed the relationships between anxiety and depression symptom dimensions and several facets of creativity: divergent thinking, creative self-concepts, everyday creative behaviors, and creative accomplishments. Latent variable models estimated effect sizes and their confidence intervals. Overall, measures of anxiety, depression, and social anxiety predicted little variance in creativity. Few models explained more than 3% of the variance, and the effect sizes were small and inconsistent in direction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Discernment and creativity: How well can people identify their most creative ideas?

How well can people judge the creativity of their ideas? The distinction between generating ideas and evaluating ideas appears in many theories of creativity, but the massive literature on generation has overshadowed the question of evaluation. After critically reviewing the notion of accuracy in creativity judgments, this article explores whether (1) people in general are discerning and (2) whether some people are more discerning than others. University students (n = 226) completed four divergent thinking tasks and then decided which responses were their most creative. Judges then rated the creativity of all of the responses. Multilevel latent-variable models found that people's choices strongly agreed with judges' ratings of the responses; overall, people were discerning in their decisions. But some people were more discerning than others: people high in openness to experience, in particular, had stronger agreement between their decisions and the judges' ratings. Creative people are thus doubly skilled: they are better at generating good ideas and at picking their best ideas. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

It doesn't hurt to ask…But sometimes it hurts to believe: Polish students' creative self-efficacy and its predictors.

This study examined predictors of creative self-efficacy (CSE) within a large sample (N=1,878) of Polish school students. Results indicate that creative self-efficacy is significantly predicted by creative abilities (measured by Test of Creative Thinking-Drawing Production) as well as self-reported originality, with 12% of the creative self-efficacy variance predicted by these criteria. Analysis of the potential antecedents of creative self-efficacy showed that it is connected with gender, socioeconomic status, and locality size. Socioeconomic status (SES) was a positive predictor of CSE. Male students were characterized by higher self-efficacy than female students and they also tended to overestimate their creative self-efficacy as predicted by abilities. In turn, females underestimated their creative self-efficacy. Socioeconomic status moderated the relations between creative abilities and creative self-efficacy, with stronger associations between abilities and efficacy in high SES groups. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)