History of Creativity:

Two eras so far Before 1950 and after 1950.

Before 1950
Thinkers thought about it: Plato - creativity involved dictating whatever the Muse chanced to speak Freud - essay on Creative writers and day-dreaming, (1908) Einstein frequently discussed imagination and creativity Vyogtsky and Jung - wrote well-known essays on the topic Francis Galton - focused more on heredity and human ability Charles Spearman and Alfred Binet - wanted to measure intelligence William James - interested in higher-level cognition Cesare Lombroso - studied genius and madness Isolated studies and papers: Chassell (1916) - adapted or created 12 different measures of originality Some of these tests tapped into problem solving others reflected high-level intellectual ability Novel Situation tests, six different questions, such as If all water, because of some change in its chemical constitution, should contract instead of expand upon freezing, what would be the effect upon animal life, including man? The responses were then graded for originality.

GUILFORDS APPROACH
1950 - convention of the American Psychological Association Guilford - (1950, 1967) placed creativity into a larger framework of intelligence in his Structure of Intellect model. Human cognition - 3 dimensions: Operations - mental gymnastics needed for any kind of task Content - the general subject area Product - actual products that result from different kinds of thinking in different kinds of subjects Guilfords (1967) model - 120 different possible mental abilities Later expanded the model to include 180 different abilities (Guilford, 1988)

One of Guilfords operations (or thought processes) was divergent thinking analyzing your response to questions with no obvious, singular answer.

Divergent production - four key components: fluency is the ability to produce a great number of ideas, flexibility is the ability to produce many different types of ideas, originality is the ability to produce the most unusual ideas, & elaboration is the ability to develop these ideas.

Guilford (1967) - the Structure of Intellect battery

Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking

(TTCT; Torrance, 1974a, 1974b, 2008) It measures all four aspects of creativity Figural and Verbal forms (each has a form A and a form B that can be used alternately) Figural forms - three subtests: Picture Construction, in which you use a basic shape and expand on it to create a picture; Picture Completion, in which you are asked to finish and title incomplete drawings; and Lines/Circles, in which you are asked to modify many different series of lines or circles (depending on the edition). Verbal forms - seven subtests: Asking, in which you ask as many questions as you can about a given picture; Guessing Causes, in which you try to guess as many possible causes for a pictured action; Guessing Consequences, in which you try to guess as many possible consequences for a pictured action; Product Improvement, in which you are asked to make changes to improve a toy; Unusual Uses, in which you are asked to think of many different possible uses for an ordinary item; Unusual Questions, in which you ask as many questions as possible about an ordinary item; and Just Suppose, in which you are asked to just suppose that an improbable situation has happened (example What if elephants could talk?), and then list the various ramifications.

TTCT in other cultures

Validation studies conducted on translated versions of TTCT in: India (Tanwar, 1979), Hong Kong (Rudowicz, Lok, & Kitto, 1995), and Japan (Saeki, Fan, & Van Dusen, 2001). Basic structure and ideas behind the TTCT are present in tests developed in many additional countries Torrance Tests continue to be revised and modified Flexibility was dropped from the most recent version of the tests because of its high correlation to fluency Replacing flexibility were two new categories in the Figural test: Abstractness of titles Resistance to Premature Closure (Torrance, 2008) Criticisms of the TTCT 1. The procedures for interpreting scores are not backed up by factor analysis (Heausler & Thompson, 1988) 2. It is easy to change scores with different instructions (Lissitz & Willhoft, 1985) 3. Overly strong relationship between fluency and originality scores (e.g., Dixon, 1979) 4. Whether a test of divergent thinking can measure all of creativity Clapham (2004) gave the TTCT along with two measures of creative interests. She found low or non-significant correlations.

MODERN DEFINITIONS OF CREATIVITY

Two components: First, creativity must represent something different, new, or innovative Second, creativity must also be appropriate to the task at hand The Geneplore model (Finke, Ward, & Smith, 1992). This framework has two phasesgenerative and exploratory. Generation, the novel part, is generating many different ideas. Exploration refers to evaluating these possible options and choosing the best one (or ones).

MODERN THEORIES OF CREATIVITY

Four facets (The Four Ps): creative product, creative process, creative person, creative press (environment)

THE CREATIVE PRODUCT A creative product is a tangible item product, response, or finished idea. It is the end result of a persons creative process, influenced by the press (environment). THE CREATIVE PROCESS A creative product is typically a tangible object, such as a short story, a painting, a design of a building, or a science experiment THE CREATIVE PERSON The difficulty in studying the creative person lies more in figuring out which aspects of the creative person should be studied. There are a wide variety of different theories, often called confluence theories, which describe models of the many variables that may influence a persons creativity. Some of these models also touch on the creative environment. THE CREATIVE PLACE (ENVIRONMENT) Environments can be more or less conducive to creativity. These environments range from the place and era of your early years to the place and social climate of your current workplace.