This study sought to assess the effects of psychological warm-up on the verbal creative thinking abilities of first-grade children. The subjects were 96 black first-grade children enrolled in two schools in Athens and Atlanta, Georgia. Both schools are located in poor neighborhoods. Children were randomly assigned to control, physical warm-up, and physical and verbal warm-up groups. Multivariate analyses of variances yielded no significant differences among the groups for verbal fluency, verbal flexibility, and verbal originality scores. The standard administration procedures of the Torrance tests were as effective as psychological warm-up in facilitating creativity test performance. Since the creativity tests have been criticized for their test-like atmosphere, the present findings and earlier studies would appear to counter the hypothesis that a game-like assessment context is necessary to facilitate test performance and/or to obtain "true" test measures of creative thinking abilities. A recent reappraisal of research evidence suggests that the discordant results may have been the result of several erroneous assumptions, particularly as they relate to the presumed creativity-intelligence distinction. (Author/JM)