The psychological qualities of the creative person in general are gradually becoming more and more clear, and yet the psychological qualities of the creative scientists remain less clear. The current investigation examined the personality characteristics of the creative scientist in a sample of 145 academic physical, biological, and social scientists (33% women) from major research universities throughout the United States. Personality data were collected online through completion of the Big Five Inventory (John, Donahue, & Kentle, 1991) and the Psychoticism subscale of the Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (Francis, Brown, & Philipchalk, 1992). Creativity was assessed using various publication and citation-based metrics from Web of Science, Science Citation Index, and Social Science Citation Index, including the h-index and the creativity index (Soler, 2007). An overall creativity index was created by log-transforming, standardizing, and summing the multiple productivity and impact measures. Results mostly confirmed the prediction that openness to experience and psychoticism would explain variance in scientific creativity once career age, gender, and area of science were statistically controlled for in a stepwise hierarchical regression model. These patterns of results confirm and extend previous research in the psychology of science and suggest that personality traits function to lower behavioral thresholds and make creative behavior in science more likely.Psychological science is at the point that it has come to understand more and more about the creative person and product in general. There are many reasons why some people are more creative than others: cognitive processes such as fiuency and fiexibility of thought; broadness and looseness of association; more balanced hetnispheric brain activity; latent inhibition and looser associations; affective qualities such as cyclothymia and sometimes negative and sometimes positive mood; and environmental conditions that encourage and foster intrinsic motivation and acceptance of failure (Amabile

IN SEARCH OF THE CREATIVE SCIENTIFIC PERSONALITY by Maya V. Grosul This study investigates whether personality is a valid predictor of creativity in science above and beyond demographic characteristics, such as career age, gender, and scientific discipline. Creativity is an act of making something new, original, and useful. Creative achievement in science is the personal ability to generate original, useful, and adaptive scientific theories, research methods, or empirical findings. Personality characteristics can operate as valid predictors of creative achievement in science. This study surveyed 145 scientists throughout the United States. Total creativity index was computed by standardizing and summing the total number of publications, total number of citations, h-index, and Soler's creativity index. As expected, openness and neuroticism were significantly positively correlated to creativity in science, while, interestingly, psychoticism was negatively correlated with creativity. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Even though my name appears on the cover of this thesis, a great number of people are responsible for this production. First, I would like to express my tremendous gratitude to my advisor Dr. Gregory Feist, whose intelligence, knowledge, and enthusiasm guided me through the exceptional journey of research in psychology. Dr. Feist gave me the opportunity to develop myself as a researcher. His own contribution to the field of psychology of science was a great inspiration for me. I would also like to thank Dr. Ronald Rogers, whose guidance helped me to develop my knowledge and understanding of research methods. He taught me how to think as a scientist. His indispensable input helped me to improve this work greatly. I also would like to thank Dr. Clifton Oyamot, whose valuable and thoughtful feedback helped me to develop better understanding of my topic. I also would like to thank Dr. Howard Tokunaga, who guided me through the art of statistics and Dr. Chancellor-Freeland who helped me to catch the neuroscience bug. I sincerely wish to thank my classmate Sarah Greene, whose assistance, energy, and encouragement helped me on various occasions. Very special thanks to my husband Alexander Grosul, whose valuable input, understanding, healthy criticism, and unwavering faith in me helped me to accomplish this milestone. I am indebted to my parents Vasily and Ludmila, my husband's parents Leonid and Tatiana, and my sister-in-law Oksana for their unconditional love, support,