The study of the creative personality has established itself as a major avenue of research on creativity and creative problem solving, other areas being creative process, product, and environment (or press). With respect to personality research, over the past 50-plus years, many studies have examined characteristics, attitudes, preferences, styles, and other personal qualities that appear to distinguish highly creative individuals. The purposes of this article are to review the accumulated body of creative personality research; describe the works of a few major researchers and their methods; briefly review theories that have been offered to explain why these personal qualities are causes, correlates, and/or outcomes of the creative process; and examine the relatively new construct of creative and problem-solving styles. Style assessment builds upon traditional personality research but holds substantial promise for talent identification and development for all individuals, not just those recognized as creatively gifted.
Sixty-two student teachers enrolled in an initial teacher education program in a medium-sized, metropolitan university completed the Kirton (1976) Adaption-Innovation Inventory (KAI), the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI;Briggs & Myers, 1976), and Khatena and Torrance's (1976) What-Kind-of-Person-Are-You checklist. Path analyses revealed a strong causal link between KAI innovator style and creative self-perceptions. Of the MBTI introversion, intuitive, thinking, and perceiver types, only intuitiveness exhibited a total causal link to creative self-perception that came close to the KAI. Creativity, personality, and cognitive style literatures are diverse and more research is suggested, although the KAI instrument appeared to be an effective predictor of scores on a creative self-perception measure.
The goal of this study was to examine the role of positive mood on generative and evaluative thinking in creative problem solving. Participants included 89 middle school students who watched either a positive or neutral mood video program. After students watched the video, they completed the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) scale to determine their current mood. Participants were then divided into three groups and given a divergent thinking task to complete. Group A was asked to generate potential solutions to a problem (generative thinking). Group B was given one solution to the problem that had been offered by participants’ peers in a previous pilot study and then asked to generate possible advantages to this particular solution (evaluative thinking). Group C was given the potential solution but asked to generate potential disadvantages (also evaluative thinking). Students in the positive mood condition were significantly more fluent than those who watched the neutral video. Students in the neutral mood condition generated more disadvantages than advantages, but this difference was significant only at p < .10. Implications and limitations of these results were discussed.
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