How do we know what we know about creativity? This article argues for the importance of specification in defining different aspects of creativity (e.g., creative potential vs. creative behavior) and how they are measured (self-reported vs. externally judged, length of assessment) when making conclusions about creativity-relevant traits and…

Glaveanu & Beghetto recently proposed defining creativity as the experience of novel person-world encounters with features of open-endedness, non-linearity, pluri-perspectives, and future orientation. This comment joins the discussion by bringing the phenomenological concepts of William James and Alfred Schütz into the conversation. They…

Psychologist J. P. Guildford issued a challenge to study creativity nearly 70 years ago. How well have we done and what might the next steps be in our endeavors to understand creativity? The field of creativity research has examined the internal thinking process of creativity, largely through measures of divergent thinking and remote associates.…

Integrating research from cognitive, social, organizational, and developmental psychology, the present article builds on the idea that constraints play a key role in creativity. The Mr. Plumbean approach, which refers to the willing integration of focusing constraints for creative purposes, emphasizes the role of attitude toward constraints in…

Curiosity, creativity, and aesthetics are typically studied separately. The extent to which they share psychological and neural mechanisms is not well understood, despite all being linked to broader personality characteristics like Openness to Experience and are driven by a desire for information and knowledge. Here, we review evidence and advance…

We propose a working definition of creative experience that involves principled engagement with the unfamiliar and a willingness to approach the familiar in unfamiliar ways. In other words, a creative experience can be defined as novel person world encounters grounded in meaningful actions and interactions, which are marked by the principles of:…

Over several decades, novel-and-appropriate has become established as the standard definition of creativity; while allowing for variations in the exact wording, the requirement that creativity requires external validation of value, utility, etc. is largely unchallenged. This functions well in high consensus fields in which value can be empirically…

In this paper we combine a philosophical theoretical analysis with human movement science empirical studies, in order to provide a better understanding of the possible links between free play and creativity. We deal in particular with some dialectical dynamics inherent to free play: the relation between rules and freedom, spontaneity which often…

As art historians have noted, "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" (1907) occupies a very special place in the history of Western painting, both as the harbinger of 20th century modernism and as the progenitor of Cubism. For these reasons, as also for its convoluted history and multivariate interpretations, there is a vast art-historical…

Increasing digitization and robotization and the resulting cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are leading to an era in which artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly prominent in our lives. Making the best use of AI in engineering and technology will require not just practical and technical knowledge and skills but "creatively-focused…

Schacter's (2001) work on "The Seven Sins of Memory" conceptualized and communicated many of the failures of memory and their critical role in cognition. At the heart of the framework is the idea that memory often fails not because it is dysfunctional or maladaptive, but because it prioritizes flexibility and the ability to think and…

A strong relationship between creativity and major depression has been attested to in many past studies. These suggest a correlation between high creative propensity and the prevalence of depression as well as attribute the implementation of creative tasks in therapy with the facilitation and reduction of depressive symptoms. This article supports…

The question of the domain-specificity of creativity represents one of the key questions in creativity research. This article contributes to the discussion by applying insights from "new phenomenology," which is a phenomenological movement from Germany initiated by philosopher Hermann Schmitz. The findings of new phenomenology suggest…

Universities, like students, differ in their ability to learn and to recreate themselves. In this article, I present a 3-part model of institutional creative change for assessing universities as learning organizations that can move creatively into the future. The first part, prerequisites, deals with actual ability to change creatively and belief…

Based on a detailed reading of Graham Wallas' "Art of Thought" (1926) it is argued that his four-stage model of the creative process (Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, Verification), in spite of holding sway as a conceptual anchor for many creativity researchers, does not reflect accurately Wallas' full account of the creative…