Creativity anxiety: Evidence for anxiety that is specific to creative thinking, from STEM to the arts.

Abstract

Creative thinking drives progress not only in the arts but also, and perhaps especially, in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and it is expected to become even more valuable than technical skill as artificial intelligence outpaces human cognition. Fostering creative thinkers has become a primary focus of educators. Educationally relevant anxieties, like math anxiety, have been shown to substantially impact specific forms of achievement and engagement, both in school and in career pursuits. Identifying these anxieties has led to promising interventions to enable affected individuals to reach their potential. Somewhat surprisingly, however, the possibility of anxiety specific to creative thinking is, to our knowledge, unexplored. In this article, across multiple samples, we tested the viability of creativity anxiety as a construct. We first created a new measure, the Creativity Anxiety Scale (CAS), demonstrating validity, internal reliability, and specificity. Applying the CAS revealed that creativity-specific anxiety predicted individual differences in creative achievement and attitudes toward creativity over and above effects of general anxiety. Moreover, across diverse content domains, from science to arts, anxiety was greater for situations that required creativity than similar situations that did not. Notably, this effect was especially pronounced in women. These findings suggest that creativity anxiety may have widereaching impacts and distinguish creativity anxiety from anxiety about noncreative aspects of performance. Establishing creativity anxiety as a novel construct, and the CAS as a valid measurement instrument, opens a new avenue of research that promises to deepen basic understanding of creative cognition and inform development of interventions to enable greater achievement of creative potential.

Exploring the Potential of Art Workshop: An Attempt to Foster People’s Creativity in an Online Environment

“…In the first workshop, three psychological scales were used: creativity anxiety (Daker et al, 2020), image of art (Agata & Okada, 2010), and image of creation (Agata & Okada, 2010). We will explain the Creativity Anxiety Scale later.…”

“…However, we also need to consider the fourth component. Previous studies have suggested that most people are anxious about engaging in creative activities with unclear answers (e.g., Agata & Okada, 2010;Daker, Cortes, Lyons, & Green, 2020) and that intrinsic motivation of the individual is essential in continuing to engage in creative activities and generate novel products (e.g., Amabile, 1988Amabile, , 1996. Reducing creativity anxiety and increasing intrinsic motivation will serve as a foundation for facilitating longterm creative activities.…”

“…In the second workshop, two psychological scales and one cognitive skill measure were used: creativity anxiety (Daker et al, 2020), openness to others, and divergent thinking skill (Figure 6). We will explain creativity anxiety later, as in the first workshop.…”

“…Finally, we described the results of creativity anxiety. Creativity anxiety is a scale used to measure the degree of anxiety about conducting creative activities proposed by Daker et al (2020).…”

Development of a child’s visual thinking by the means of original children’s animation

“…The potential of information technologies in the development of a preschool child is realized by us through our method of original children's animation based on using an animation studio [8]. Work in an animation studio as an example of the implementation of information and computer technologies in preschool education has great potential for the development of visual thinking, particularly for the development of visual coding and visual analysis which can be considered the "problem areas" based on the results of the conducted pilot study [9][10][11][12].…”