Browsing by Subject "creativity"
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Item A qualitative case study of the impact of socio-cultural factors on prominent Turkish writers(2009-05-15) Gunersel, Adalet BarisThis study investigates socio-cultural factors that impact the lives of highly creative writers, specifically, novelists in a specific socio-cultural context, Turkey. Research objectives included the investigation of the definition of creativity, creative processes and products by highly creative Turkish writers, and socio-cultural factors that influenced the development of their creativity. The qualitative case study was used and interviews with four participants, or cases, shed light onto the focus of the study. Four novelists who fit certain criteria were selected: (a) they have invented, designed, and produced creative work regularly and their work has influenced Turkish literature; (b) they were Turkish citizens who have lived 75% of their lives in Turkey and received their education in Turkey; and (c) they varied in age and gender. The participants were Ya?ar Kemal (85, male), Adalet A?ao?lu (81, female), Mario Levi (51, male), and Latife Tekin (51, female). Interviews with the participants were transcribed, translated from Turkish into English, and analyzed. The constant comparative method (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Lincoln & Guba, 1985) was used as the method of analysis. Other documents about the participants were also used as data sources. Results indicate that participants? views of creativity resemble both Western and non-Western views of creativity and their views of creative processes and products are similar to former research findings on creative individuals and creativity in general. Overarching themes include (a) environmental catalysts that prompted creativity; (b) emotional and professional support networks in participants? lives; and (c) participants? self-efficacy. Although environmental catalysts include events that cause both positive and negative emotions, two of the participants emphasize the role of negative feelings, such as anger and sadness, in the stimulation of creativity. The participants have had various sources of support from either certain individuals, such as a teacher or a friend, or groups of individuals, such as their readers. Participants? self-efficacy emerges from various personality traits such as determination, persistence, rebelliousness, outspokenness, and independence. Findings indicate that education is an important socio-cultural factor that can enhance or hinder creativity and that teachers have a crucial role in the development of their students.Item Archetypal Creativity and Healing: An Empirical Study of Floral Design (Ikebana)(2010-10-12) Sotirova-Kohli, Milena D.The theory of embodied cognition focuses on mechanisms of meaning beyond the traditional in western metaphysics dichotomy of body and mind. These mechanisms are considered to be the emerging aspects of meaning related to early infant experience of interaction with the environment. Image schema as the earliest form of representation in the mind corresponds to the notion of archetype from analytical psychology. Theory and research suggest that being in touch with the archetypal level of cognition is related to integration of parts of the personality and promotes well-being. Art and creativity are considered to facilitate this process and in this sense to promote healing. Active imagination is a method devised by C. G. Jung to relate to different aspects of the personality through creativity which results in a creative product. Active imagination bears similarity to art, however it focuses not only on the aesthetic outcome of the creative endeavor but also on the transformation of the personality in this process. Analytical psychology studies a number of creative expressions of the products of active imagination such as sand play, drawing, clay modeling, writing, dancing and psychodrama. However, there are no available empirical studies of the healing aspects of creative work with cut flowers. We hypothesized that being involved in creative work with cut flowers would promote well -being expressed in increase of hope, existential/spiritual meaning and humility and decrease of depression, anxiety and physiological symptoms. The participants in our study were undergraduate students from Texas A&M University either involved in a semester long course in Floral Design or in an Introductory Psychology Course. Participants were assessed at two time points on all variables of interest. They were also asked to draw mandalas and to write essays (floral condition). Although quantitative analysis did not find any significant differences between the groups over time as a result of the creative work with cut flowers, the qualitative analysis of the mandala-drawings and the essays showed statistically significant tendency to balance, centeredness and calmness over time in the floral group.Item Are Mental Blocks Forgotten During Creative Problem Solving Due to Inhibitory Control?(2012-10-19) Angello, Genna MarieAttempting to retrieve a target from memory via a retrieval cue can cause competition from the cue's associates, which might block the target. A 1994 study by Anderson, Bjork, and Bjork demonstrated retrieval-induced forgetting for competing associates and suggested that inhibitory control resolving competition causes the forgetting. A 2011 study by Storm, Angello, and Bjork found forgetting for incorrect associates following creative problem solving. This thesis investigated whether such forgetting is also the result of inhibitory control. Competition was manipulated by instructing participants to remember or forget incorrect associates before working on a Remote Associates Test problem. If problem-solving-induced forgetting is caused by inhibition, then to-be-remembered associates should suffer more forgetting than to-be-forgotten associates. Overall, forgetting occurred for incorrect associates participants were instructed to remember and forget. However, the first quartile of trials showed forgetting only for to-be-remembered associates following longer problem solving durations, suggesting a possible role of inhibitory control as an active means to overcome fixation in creative problem solving.Item Characterizing the Effects of Noise and Domain Distance in Analogous Design(2012-07-16) Lopez, RicardoIdea generation is one of the major initial steps of the design process. Designers frequently use analogies to explain concepts, predict potential problems, and generate ideas. Analogous design can stimulate idea generation and lead to novelty and creativity. At present, there is little research that explores analogous design under the presence of irrelevant information, 'noise', or the effects of using analogies from semantically distant domains. An "Analogies and Noise" experiment extends previous findings which indicate that the use of two analogues instead of one can enhance analogous transfer. It tests whether this holds true for increased numbers of analogies. This study hypothesizes that analogue transfer improves with increasing number of example analogues and deteriorates under the presence of noise. The experiment evaluated this hypothesis by presenting designers with a design problem and a set of analogues and noise. Improvement was primarily measured by the rate of participants identifying the relevant high level principle (HLP). The results indicate that: (1) recognition of HLPs deteriorates under noise (2) increasing numbers of analogues under noise initially improves HLP recognition; however, once many items are present, designers are overwhelmed and the HLP recognition rate decreases (3) using two analogues is optimal for design and (4) noise cannot be defined as all those items without a functional feature relevant to the problem. A "Distant Domains" pilot experiment explores the use of distant-domain analogies. This study hypothesizes that distant domain analogies lead to more abstraction resulting in more creative designs. The experiment presented participants with a predetermined set of analogues then asked them to solve a problem. The set contained analogies from the problem domain and from a domain of varying distance. The following patterns were observed: (1) the number of emergent features peaked with near-domain analogies and decreased thereafter (2) the mean total number of ideas increased with increasing domain (3) designers deemed analogies from distant domains as 'less useful' and solutions generated using distant domains as 'less effective' and 'less practical'. These trends warrant future experimentation with an increased sample size.Item Combative creativity: resistance to cognitive fixation effects in an idea generation task(Texas A&M University, 2005-11-01) Woodward, Robert StevenThis study investigated whether individuals identified as highly creative can resist a cognitive fixation tendency brought upon by the introduction of examples prior to an idea generation task. Ninety-eight subjects, ranging in age from twelve to seventeen and participating in Texas A&M University??s Youth Adventure Program for gifted students, comprised the sample. All took the Thinking Creatively with Sounds and Words test and were divided into three creativity groups (high, middle, and low) based on originality scores. A proportional stratified random sampling procedure was implemented to ensure equal representation for experimental and control groups. The subjects were then presented an experimenter-designed idea generation task, patterned after Smith, Ward, & Schumacher (1993), that called for them to generate ideas for a chair of the future. The experimental group viewed examples prior to task onset that all included three specific features relevant to the design of a chair (adjustable lever, four legs, drink holder). The control group did not view any examples prior to task onset. Conformity effects were measured in relation to the proportion of the features in the examples that were included in the ideas generated by the subjects. Chi-square and a model generated analysis of variance procedure were used to determine if there were any significant direct or interaction effects for both the creativity and treatment groupings on the construct of conformity. The results demonstrated that subjects in the control group conformed at a significantly lesser rate than the experimental one, across all creativity groupings. A significant difference was also found between the high and low creativity groups for conformity. The ANOVA data additionally discovered a significant interaction effect between the variables of treatment condition and creativity grouping, indicating that the interplay of these two variables influenced results. Finally, the conformity rate of those individuals with the highest level of creativity, true to the linear nature of the initial polynomial trend contrast, were, on average, the lowest observed scores.Item Fostering creativity: a meta-analytic inquiry into the variability of effects(Texas A&M University, 2005-08-29) Huang, Tse-YangThe present study used the method of meta-analysis to synthesize the empirical research on the effects of intervention techniques for fostering creativity. Overall, the average effect sizes of all types of creativity training were sizable, and their effectiveness could be generalized across age levels and beyond school settings. Generally, among these training programs, CPS (Creative Problem Solving) spent the least training time and gained the highest training effects on creativity scores. In addition, ??Other Attitudes programs,?? which presumed to motivate or facilitate the creativity motivation, also presented sizable effect size as other types of creativity training programs. As for the issue of creativity ability vs. skills, this analysis did not support the notion that figural components of the TTCT (Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking) might be measuring the relatively stable aspects of creativity proposed by Rose and Lin (1984). Because the figural form of the TTCT did not obtain the lowest effect size, the results indicated that the view of multi-manifestation of creativity is a more plausible explanation. And since neither the Stroop Color and Word Test or the Raven Progressive Matrices was found in the studies, this issue was difficult to investigate further. From the path-model analysis, it can be implied that a research design with a control group and student sample would more likely lead to publication, which would influence the effect size index. Unfortunately, from the information provided in the articles included in this study, there were not any quantitative data about motivation or related measurement of the participants, which is a major problem and impedes this study for creating a better path-model. This study has many implications which merit investigation. One approach follows the concepts of aptitude-treatment interactions, which is focused on each individual??s unique strengths and talent, and the goals of a creativity training program should help them to recognize, to develop their own creative potential, and finally to learn to express it in their own way. Another involves developing the assessment techniques and criteria for individuals as well as collecting related information regarding attitudes and motivation during the training process.Item Haiku, Nature, and Narrative: An Empirical Study of the Writing Paradigm and Its Theories(2014-04-04) Stephenson, Kittredge TThe present study continued an examination of haiku poetry within the context of the writing paradigm. Groups were compared with respect to three factors?writing type (narrative, haiku, or haibun), image content (nature or non-nature), and affective valence (positive or negative)?on short-term effects (arousal, affective valence, and flow), as well as longer-term negative (anxiety, depression, physiological symptomatology) and positive attributes (spiritual meaning, creativity, mindfulness). The study included a representative sample of 235 participants from a large southwestern university. Longer-term measures were compared using a priori contrasts and Analysis of Covariance, while short-term measures were analyzed via a priori contrasts and Repeated Measures Analysis of Variance. In comparing groups whose writing involved narrative versus those that wrote only haiku, there was some evidence that participants experienced greater salubrious change when their writing included narrative: mindfulness, change in affective valence, and flow all increased. There were no significant differences between participants who wrote haiku about nature versus a non-nature topic. Relative to those writing haiku in response to negative nature images, those writing haiku in response to positive nature images evinced decreased depressive symptomatology, increased physiological symptomatology, and greater positive change in affective valence. Finally, flow served as a significant main effect for post-writing affective valence across groups, in addition to pre-writing affective valence: the effect was consistent for the narrative group, developed over time for the haiku group, and decreased over time for the haibun group. None of the groups demonstrated significant change on the longer-term measures from baseline to follow-up, however, raising questions about the effectiveness of writing in response to images. The implications of the present study and possibilities for future research are discussed.Item Increasing creative fluency in organizational environments: A comparison of the relative impact between environmental factors(2009-05-15) Wurtz, WilliamChanges brought about primarily by accelerating information technology have elevated innovation to the forefront of organizations? strategic concerns as the only sustainable competitive advantage. Innovation in turn requires organizational environments where creativity is supported and fostered. The vital initial step in an effective change effort to bring about more creative organizational environments is to conduct an assessment. However, no new creativity assessment instrument has been developed in over two decades. This study presents the findings from a new organizational creativity assessment instrument, supplemented with data from a qualitative data-collection process involving in-depth interviews with a few representative employees from each organization. The development of the instrument draws upon recent creativity literature, primarily theoretical and anecdotal, resulting in 28 questionnaire items. Each item represents a potential environmental influence of creativity in a particular organization. One subset is physical or tangible environmental factors, such as the building where people work, as well as less tangible factors, such as ?management response.? The instrument was administered in four different organizations in four different industries in an effort to begin to determine the utility of the instrument (n = 81). The results from the different organizations, including straightforward statistical tests, facilitated comparisons of differences in the amount and type of creativity supports between organizations. The qualitative data provided a check of confirmatory detail to the quantitative results, as well as providing rich contextual detail. A factor analysis was conducted on the overall results in order to determine if there was a possible underlying structure to the multitude of variables included in the survey instrument. The analysis revealed five factors, Creativity Management Process, Cultural Support Mechanisms, Organizational Inputs, Discussion Stimuli, and Organizational Helpfulness. Overall, the major conclusion is that the instrument is a potentially useful tool warranting further development and refinement and, ultimately, a full test of its validity and reliability. Also, the qualitative data added valuable context to understanding an organization?s creativity culture, as well as providing confirmatory support for the survey findings. An additional finding is that physical aspects of the environment were not recognized as significant factors in influencing organizational creativity.Item Organizational justice: a potential facilitator or barrier to individual creativity(2009-05-15) Simmons, Aneika L.In an effort to obtain and sustain competitive advantage via creative performance, organizations often seek individuals who possess traits known to improve the likelihood for creativity. Literature suggests that contextual factors may influence the level of creative performance of individuals with creative potential. The influence of organizational justice, a prominent and pervasive environmental factor, on creative output has been largely ignored. I assert that organizational justice (i.e., distributive, procedural, and interactional) may not only moderate the relationship between creativity enhancing traits and creative performance, it may also have a main effect relationship with creative performance. Therefore, I investigate the relationship between variables found to be precursors to individual creativity, distributive justice, procedural justice, interactional justice, and creative performance in a laboratory setting utilizing undergraduate business students. Participants completed an in-basket exercise to help determine how justice issues may influence individuals with creative potential. The empirical evidence for the hypotheses is minimal. I found some support for a main effect relationship between procedural justice and individual creativity. The findings also suggest that distributive justice moderates the relationship between openness to experience and individual creative performance. Thus, there is some evidence that justice factors may have a limited relationship with individual creative performance.Item You must be creative! The effect of performance feedback on intrinsic motivation and creativity(2009-05-15) Benzer, Justin KaneFeedback sign (positive, negative, or no feedback sign) and feedback style (autonomous, controlling, or no feedback style) were manipulated in a 3x3 repeated measures design. Two hundred thirty-three undergraduate students from introductory psychology classes completed measures of perceived competence, perceived choice, and interest over four time periods. Interest was regressed on perceived competence, perceived choice, and a moderation analysis revealed that perceived choice moderated the effect of perceived competence on interest. Creative answers to open-ended problems were assessed after time 2 (before feedback), and after time 3 (after feedback). Feedback style (autonomous, controlled, and neutral) and Feedback sign (positive, negative, and neutral) manipulations were analyzed using a 3x3 ANOVA, revealing no effect of feedback. Post-hoc analyses using perceived difficulty of the first creative problem as a covariate revealed an interaction of feedback style and difficulty, limiting between subjects analyses. Creativity was also regressed on interest. Pre-feedback interest predicted creativity according to expectations, but post-feedback interest did not predict creativity. Creativity did predict post-performance interest, possibly implying that interest is not a valid proxy for intrinsic motivation in within-subjects designs. Future studies should test the proposition that feedback affects intrinsic motivation, which in turn affects creative performance, and creative performance affects interest.