Through Thick and Thin: Changes in Creativity During the First Lockdown of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

COVID-19 took us by surprise. We all had to face the lockdown and pandemic that put us in a new context, changing our way of life, work conditions, and habits. Coping with such an unprecedented situation may have stimulated creativity. However, the situation also restricted our liberties and triggered health or psychological difficulties. We carried out an online survey (n = 380) to examine whether and how the COVID-19 related first lockdown period was associated with creativity changes in French speaking population. Despite a global negative subjective experience of the situation, participants reported that they were more creative during the lockdown than before. Positive changes were linked with more time availability, more motivation, or the need to solve a problem while negative changes were related to negative affective feelings or a lack of resources or opportunities. This study documents the effects of the first lockdown period on creativity and the factors that influenced it.

Creative leisure activities, mental health and well-being during 5 months of the COVID-19 pandemic: a fixed effects analysis of data from 3725 US adults

“…Participants reported how long they had spent on the last weekday engaging in (1) reading for pleasure, (2) arts/crafts activities (eg, painting, creative writing, sewing, playing music), (3) digital arts activities (eg, streaming a concert, virtual tour of a museum), (4) gardening, (5) watching television, films, Netflix or similar, (6) listening to the radio or music, (7) doing DIY (do-it-yourself), woodwork, metal work, model making or similar and (8) another hobby not already mentioned. Time spent on each activity was categorised as none, low (<30 min) or high (≥30 min).…”

“…as in previous cross-sectional studies. [3][4][5][6][7][8][9] Fixed effects models account for observed and unobserved individual heterogeneity. However, they do not address the directionality of associations, so our analyses do not demonstrate whether changes in leisure activities cause changes in mental health and well-being or vice versa.…”

“…3 Some older adults also reported doing hobbies and other creative activities, such as cooking and baking, listening to music and reading to help them cope during the pandemic. 4 Elsewhere, also in cross-sectional surveys, people have reported increases in creativity during the pandemic, [5][6][7][8] with increased time spent on creative activities such as crafts, fine arts, music and performing arts all associated with enhanced well-being. 6 In correlation analyses of another cross-sectional survey of Australian adults, more time spent on artistic creative activities was correlated with lower anxiety and depressive symptoms and less loneliness.…”

#Creativity: Exploring lay conceptualizations of creativity with Twitter hashtags.

“…Both clusters were visibly affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, which led to greater prevalence of the respective clusters. For #creativity, this was related to personally cope with Covid, adding to the existing literature that shows how creativity was affected by the pandemic (e.g., Ceh & Benedek, 2022;Karwowski et al, 2021;Lopez-Persem et al, 2022) while for #innovation, this was related to tackling Covid-19 through technology. Similarly, while the role of motivation seems highly relevant for the creative process in #creativity, motivation is strongly implicated in business success for #innovation.…”

“…The high accessibility and popularity of the platform, its simplistic approach to use short text to convey thoughts, as well as the implicit orientation towards ephemeral events allows researchers to utilize Twitter as a window to investigate what we share with the world in a digitally naturalistic environment. Creativity is one such part of our everyday lives that is affected by societal and contextual challenges and circumstances, such as the COVID-19 pandemic (Karwowski et al, 2021;Lopez-Persem et al, 2022) and digitalization (Bruno & Canina, 2019;Hoffmann et al, 2016;Lee & Chen, 2015). We frequently use online platforms such as Twitter to consume and contribute creative content , and through these platforms, we can gain insights into specific aspects of creative behavior, such as the topical composition of do-it-yourself videos (Ceh & Benedek, 2022), or the use of creative linguistic strategies for malevolent purposes (de Saint Laurent et al, 2020).…”