Art and design involve divergent creative processes. Design is a more constrained domain than art. While creativity in some specific domains, such as painting, sculpture, and music, has been widely studied, some have as yet been little explored. One example is stone carving. What characterizes stone carving, as a creative occupation? What is a…

The purpose of this study was to explore music teachers' perceptions of, and approaches to, creativity in Primary education. Even though teachers' perceptions on creativity have been investigated broadly and extensively, qualitative research on music teachers' beliefs nurturing the students' creativity in Primary education are less common. In the…

Do adolescents remember imaginary companions (ICs) from early childhood? Researchers interviewed 46 adolescent participants in a prospective longitudinal study about their ICs from early childhood (age 5 1/2). The existence of one or more ICs was documented in early childhood for 48% of children (G. Trionfi & E. Reese, 2009). At age 16, most…

The experience of wonder is often said to be at the origin of acts of creativity, both historical and mundane, from big breakthroughs in science to the everyday discoveries of children at play. And yet, wonder and wondering have rarely been theorized until now, at least in the psychology of creativity. Understood as one of the main ways in which…

Given the recent emphasis on exploring valence in creative behavior, this study examines negative creativity via a person-situation interactionist perspective. By manipulating goal valence (uses or misuses) and object valence (positive or negative), four conditions of an adapted Divergent Thinking task were used to predict positive and negative…

This study examined the direct and indirect associations among imaginational over-excitability, cognitive play processes, affective play processes, and parent-reported creative potential of Hong Kong Chinese kindergarten children. Participants were 106 parents of local kindergarten children (43.4% girls, mean age = 60.1 months). Parents reported…

This study aims to examine the impact of affective states and affective shifts on ideation and evaluation of creativity. Affects were induced by a two-stage imagination procedure of recalling autobiographical experiences. Three periods of divergent thinking were measured to represent the participants' creative ideation at different times. Creative…

Creative generation is structured around existing knowledge and task examples, yet overreliance on specific examples may limit imagination (Ward, T. B., Finke, R. A., & Smith, S. M., 1995). The constraining influence of knowledge during creative generation may be offset by conceptual expansion, a process of thinking outside traditional…

While the scientific investigation into creativity is a recent phenomenon, creative thinking has always been a crucial feature of humanity. The ability to creatively solve problems enabled early humans to survive and laid the foundation for the creative imagination that has resulted in our modern society. While most humans no longer face physical…

The process of drawing is a creative endeavor, often beginning with ideas of what to draw. This exploratory study aimed to explore these creative intentions of pupils from mainstream schools (tending to focus on observational, imaginative, and expressive drawing), and from Steiner schools (tending to focus on imagination and expression).…

T. B. Ward (1994) investigated creativity by asking participants to draw alien creatures that they imagined to be from a planet very different from Earth. He found that participant drawings reliably contained features typical of common Earth animals. As a consequence, Ward concluded that creativity is structured. The present investigation predicts…

The purpose of this study was twofold: (1) to analyze the effects of both personality and environmental variables on the imagination of video/film major university students; and (2) to test the mediator effect resulting from the variable of social climate. The results of this study supported both indicators of imaginative capabilities and…

Creativity is an important component of human intelligence, and imbuing artificially intelligent systems with creativity is an interesting challenge. In particular, it is difficult to quantify (or even qualify) creativity. Recently, it has been suggested that conditions for attributing creativity to a system include: appreciation, imagination, and…

Building upon previously developed and more general dual-process models, this paper provides empirical support for a multidimensional thinking style construct comprised of linear thinking and multiple dimensions of nonlinear thinking. A self-report assessment instrument (Linear/Nonlinear Thinking Style Profile; LNTSP) is presented and…

The development of group creativity can be challenging for both young students and their teachers. This study examined the processes and learning outcomes of group creativity training from the perspectives of elementary school students and teachers while identifying critical factors that contributed to the success of the training. Data were…