No abstract

Creative thinking skills can be considered one of the key competencies for the twenty-first century-they allow us to remain flexible and provide us with the capacity to deal with the opportunities and challenges that are part of our complex and fast-changing world. The increased focus on innovation combined with recent reports of decrements in creative performance brings attention to the need to develop creative thinking skills at both the educational and business levels. The main objective of the current project was to develop and scientifically test a brief, domain-unspecific creativity training. Undergraduate university students (N = 32) participated in the creativity training, which was a single session of 1.5 h and employed a cognitive approach (i.e., participants were shown how to apply creative thinking techniques in a systematic fashion). The effectiveness of the training was tested by means of a pre-and post-training comparison employing creativity measures that relied on divergent thinking, convergent thinking, and creative problem solving skills. To control for a possible instrumentation threat, two versions of each task were created and counterbalanced between the pre-and postmeasure across participants. Following the creativity training, improvements were observed across a variety of creative performance measures. Importantly, the creativity level of the ideas generated during the divergent thinking task improved post-training. Moreover, the findings of the current study shed light on a possible underlying mechanism for these improvements in creativity, that is, cognitive flexibility. In addition to these divergent thinking skills, the training also improved convergent thinking and produced marginal improvements in creative problem solving skills. The current findings have important implications for educational and organizational settings, as they suggest that this brief creativity training (or one employing similar cognitive techniques) could be implemented to facilitate creative thinking skills.

No abstract

Creativity can be considered one of the key competencies for the twenty-first century. It provides us with the capacity to deal with the opportunities and challenges that are part of our complex and fast-changing world. The question as to what facilitates creative cognition—the ability to come up with creative ideas, problem solutions and products—is as old as the human sciences, and various means to enhance creative cognition have been studied. Despite earlier scientific studies demonstrating a beneficial effect of music on cognition, the effect of music listening on creative cognition has remained largely unexplored. The current study experimentally tests whether listening to specific types of music (four classical music excerpts systematically varying on valance and arousal), as compared to a silence control condition, facilitates divergent and convergent creativity. Creativity was higher for participants who listened to ‘happy music’ (i.e., classical music high on arousal and positive mood) while performing the divergent creativity task, than for participants who performed the task in silence. No effect of music was found for convergent creativity. In addition to the scientific contribution, the current findings may have important practical implications. Music listening can be easily integrated into daily life and may provide an innovative means to facilitate creative cognition in an efficient way in various scientific, educational and organizational settings when creative thinking is needed.

Research on warning labels printed on cigarette packages has shown that fear inducing health warnings might provoke defensive responses. This study investigated whether reformulating statements into questions could avoid defensive reactions. Smokers were presented with either warning labels formulated as questions, textual warning labels, graphic warning labels, or no warning labels. Participants' smoking-related risk perception was higher after exposure to warning labels formulated as questions or no warning labels than after exposure to textual or graphic warning labels. These results indicate that reformulating statements into questions can avoid defensive responses elicited by textual- and graphic warning labels.