Emergency situations are generally described as combining both threat and time pressure. Creative solutions to deal with such situations are important. The present studies (N[subscript total] = 1190) investigated how people are able to produce creative solutions in an emergency. Our first study was correlational, and assessed individual creativity…

Creativity in science education and research on scientific creativity are becoming increasingly significant. Several domain-specific assessment tools focusing on different aspects of scientific creativity have been developed. Some of these tools consider a wide range of aspects, while others focus on very specific science-related aspects, thereby…

Idea evaluation is a critical activity in the creative process due to its role in making a decision about what idea(s) should be developed further and implemented, or whether more ideas should be generated. Confidence in the correctness of the evaluation plays a key role in making that decision. Emerging evidence suggests that inner speaking, the…

An increasing number of studies have explored the process of how subjects solve problems through remote association. Most research has investigated the relationship between an individual's response to semantic search during the think-aloud operation and the individual's reply performance. Few studies, however, have examined the process of…

The Chinese Radical Assembly Game (CRAG) is an online platform that assesses the lexical competence. In which, individuals select different Chinese radicals to combine them and form a legitimate character. This concept is similar to that of creative synthesis. Therefore, this study aimed to examine whether the CRAG response process involves…

The effect of napping versus wakefulness was studied on primed and repeated Remote Associate Tests (RATs) and on divergent creativity tests. The participants were 42 students from the USA, studying international courses at a Swedish university. The hypotheses for the RATs were (1), when the correct answers were primed before the nap, the RAT…

Where do novel ideas come from? What mental processes facilitate them? The disinhibition hypothesis suggests creative cognition can be assisted by reducing cognitive inhibition of ideas, facilitating looser associative thoughts to bond with one another to produce novel concepts. Past exploration of the disinhibition hypothesis has been drawn from…

Many studies have found that creativity tends to promote happiness, but the underlying mechanism remains unclear. This study proposed and tested a serial mediation model to investigate the relationships among creativity, problem solving, stress, and happiness on emerging adults and adolescents (N = 1,146). It is hypothesized that creativity is…

The literature on insight problems--problems that supposedly can only be solved by rejection of an initial faulty problem representation and sudden comprehension of another, nonobvious representation (restructuring)--suggests that the size of initial representations affects the very process of problem solving. Large initial representations impose…

Both creativity and humor are high-level cognitive functions and complex concepts. Although creativity and humor are generally deemed positively correlated, it has been difficult to explicitly identify their relationship with each other. The cognitive process of creativity includes divergent thinking, insight, and remote association, whereas humor…

Evidence from a range of fields shows that representation-connection (RC) is the key step towards the solution of a real-world insight problem. However, no study has focused on the inter-individual variability in RC, and little is known about whether structural and resting-state functional signals can account for inter-individual differences in…

Generating creative ideas in a brainstorm session `is a crucial part of innovation. However, for actual implementation, the most creative ideas must be selected from a pool of ideas. To date, idea selection has remained relatively unexplored and validated instruments to measure idea selection performance are not systematically employed. This study…

The purpose of this study was to examine the influences of sibling constellation (sex and birth order) on creativity in the context of China's one-child policy (OCP) and Confucian culture (e.g., preference for male offspring). Participants were recruited from a public university in east China and were asked to complete 2 divergent thinking tests,…

Studies on whether fixation cues provided in the first episode of divergent thinking tasks influence creative outcomes after incubation, as they do for convergent problem-solving tasks, remain limited. This research examined the beneficial effects of incubation using the delayed- and immediate-incubation paradigms. Participants in Experiment 1…

Evidence from a range of fields indicates that inventions are often inspired by drawing a parallel to solutions found in nature. However, the cognitive mechanism of this process is not well understood. The cognitive mechanism of heuristic prototype in scientific innovation was tested with 3 experiments. First, 84 historical accounts of important…