People from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan commonly believe that to be creative, one must be innovative, dynamic, and intellectual, while in the West, artistic expression is also very commonly associated with creativity (Rudowicz & Yue, 2000). These creative people, and their creative products, are responsible for massive change, such as a single computer chip going from only being able to hold five transistors in 1964, to now holding a billion or more transistors (Puccio, Mance, Switalski, & Reali, 2012). Yet, very few people recognize that emotions themselves are creative products. A very strong case has been made that emotions are inexorably linked to moral judgments (Prinz, 2006), and predict changes in cognition, judgment, experience, behavior, and physiology (Lench, Flores, & Bench, 2011). It would not be an exaggeration to say that emotions are the very foundation for how people make sense of our world. People respond emotionally all the time, but even experiencing the same situation, people may have widely different emotional reactions with some reactions more adaptable than others. Averill deems this ability to create emotions emotional creativity and has provided plentiful evidence that people differ greatly in this ability (Averill, 1999) and that differences in the factors that compose emotional creativity change how we evaluate works of art (Averill, Chon, &
Hahn, 2001). By learning how to create new, authentic, and useful emotional reactions, people can learn how to greater appreciate artwork. Further, if something tragic happens, people with higher emotional creativity may have a much broader range of reactions available to them, and thus will be able to better emotionally cope with any given situation.
Therefore, improving or changing emotional creativity could potentially greatly alter people’s worldviews and help them live more fulfilling lives.
Creativity could have huge benefits, so it is understandable that some countries show an interest in fostering it. China, for example, found that their students are
insufficiently creative when compared to students in other countries (Niu & Sternberg, 2003), and has since aimed to boost the creativity of its population (Chang, 2009). If only China is successful in this endeavor more than 1.354 billion people (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2013) stand to improve their creative potential.
In light of the modern world economy, a decision to actively improve creativity among the populace makes good economic sense. According to the economist Florida (2002), a new group of workers called the “Creative Class” has come into the spotlight on the world stage. This new class of worker is focused on producing products of the mind rather than physical objects. They create ideas, designs, and other creative content. More than 30 percent of the U.S. population now is considered members of the creative class, up from less than 10 percent in the 1950s.
But most education all over the world is still geared to an industrial economic model. According to Puccio, et al. (2012) children are expected to accumulate as much knowledge as possible as quickly as possible, and teachers are held accountable for how much material their students learn. That is why testing is so common: how many facts can children regurgitate, and how well do they analyze content someone else produced? These tests measure knowledge, not creative skills. Process-based skills such as creative problem solving are currently almost never taught to students outside of specialty programs, sadly out of reach of the majority of students. As Puccio et al. put it, “we are preparing all students to become assembly line workers” (p. 26, 2012) when the 21st century economy is no longer industrial, but instead a creative economy.
School is obviously not the only place one can learn, but a huge number of hours are spent learning there. Knowledge is still important, so perhaps creativity can be taught alongside knowledge rather than at the exclusion of it. To do so, existing techniques that are shown to boost creativity could be more widely applied. Further, teachers who are already trained in existing techniques would not need additional training—all they’d have
to do is use one of the teaching methods already in their repertoire more often. So, in order to help ensure creativity makes it into classrooms, it should be combined with a method that can simultaneously teach creativity as well as factual and analytical abilities so that creativity is not taught at the expense of something else. This approach can be used for emotional creativity as well. If factual knowledge, cognitive creativity training, and emotional creativity training can be combined into the same program, then the chances they’re adopted go up significantly. Unfortunately, no emotional creativity training currently exists, so it hasn’t been combined with established methods. People don’t even know for sure whether emotional creativity can be trained.
1.1 Statement of the Problem
The problems with combining creativity training into already-existing curriculum is too broad of an issue to address in a single study. However, pinpointing one way to enhance both creativity in general and emotional creativity using an existing teaching tool, is a reasonable problem to address. This study breaks the problem down into three areas:
how to define creativity, what teaching methods are already being used in classes that could potentially include creativity training, and then how to practically combine one of those methods with creativity training.
Creativity is a highly complex subject that must be defined before trying to teach it.
Otherwise, training methods may end up enhancing something that doesn’t need or isn't desired to be improved. To integrate training in schools using already existing methods, it must first be known what methods are being used, and which could potentially be most suitable for creativity training. Once it is decided which method is most appropriate, how then is that method actually transformed into creative practice?
Creativity means a lot of things to a lot of different people. Defining it was frustrating enough that even experts in the field have considered throwing up their hands
and giving up (Runco, 2007). Examining it cannot be taken lightly, especially since most literature has neglected to include emotions as a creative output. Runco also posited that theories of cognitive creativity may outnumber any other kind of theory (2007). Emotional creativity, in contrast to cognitive creativity, is still in its infancy and was only coined as late as 1989 (Thomas, 1989). It certainly has not undergone the same scrutiny as cognitive creativity, and nobody has attempted to integrate its measures to evaluate the effectiveness of creativity training.
There are as many teaching methods as there are teachers, and teaches use a huge variety of mediums to impart knowledge. Even the question of which teaching mediums have been scrutinized in studies on creativity training produces ten (Scott et al., 2004) or more. But certainly not all creativity training methods are equal, and some must be more suited to the task than others. Which methods of teaching creativity work, how well they work, and what delivery methods are best are important questions. Further, whether or not these methods can improve emotional creativity is a separate from whether or not they can enhance cognitive creativity scores.
Finally, if case-based learning and cooperative learning do well with cognitive creativity, what can we borrow from them that would be likely to enhance both cognitive creativity and emotional creativity?
1.2 Potential Solutions
Creativity, when thought of as an abstract concept, is assuredly difficult to define.
Yet, when one sees creativity, typically one can acknowledge its presence. Thus, defining creativity can be done operationally: what do people consider creative? Averill (1999) points out that a creative product can be judged as creative if it meets all three of the following criteria: novelty, effectiveness, and authenticity. Importantly, this criteria for creativity works for both cognitive products and emotional responses, and therefore can be
applied to emotional creativity as well. Once creativity has been linked to its outputs, it becomes much easier to measure. Simply put: does a certain mental skill help increase the amount and quality of creative outputs one can produce? Thankfully, Torrance has designed a cognitive creativity test, the TTCT, that can predict both private and public creative achievements even 50 years after it is administered (Runco, Millar, Acar, &
Cramond, 2010). Therefore, theoretically, any creativity training that increases scores on the TTCT would also increase actual creative achievement. Emotional creativity has also been linked to increased creative output both in the laboratory (Gutbezahl & Averill, 1996) and in everyday life, and further can be effectively measured by the Emotional Creativity Index (ECI) (Averill, 1999).
Out of all of the instructional media used to teach creativity in the classroom, Scott et al. (2004) analyzed ten. They found that even though all attempts at enhancing creativity scores were successful overall, how the training was implemented in the classroom did change the size of the effect. Of the implementations examined, case-based and cooperative learning are the leading candidates for the strongest influence on gains in cognitive creativity. Case-based learning involves problems meant to foster discussion, exploration, and that have no single right answer (Center for Instructional Development &
Distance Education, 2008). Cooperative learning similarly is a method where students are divided into small groups, engage in discussion, and then are rated based on group performance (Slavin, 1980). Role-play, taking on the role of another person, has many similarities to case-based learning and cooperative learning in that it requires discussion, exploration, and has no single right answer. It is also frequently used in teaching world-wide (Lane & Rollnick, 2007) but was not specifically examined by Scott et al. (2004). Yet, a major difference between it and the other two methods mentioned is that role-play involves assuming the emotional state of a character in a story, whereas case-based and cooperative learning require no such thing. Averill (1999) points out that we could be
learning emotional creativity from experience with different emotional situations, and even implies that dramatic acting makes use of these same mechanisms. Whether or not practice in drama could actually improve or alter emotional creativity is unknown, but it is the best lead currently presented in the literature.
Role-playing has already been linked definitively to cognitive creativity when it has been played as a game. Tsui-shan Chung (2013) found that people who participated in tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs, the non-computerized form of role-playing games) had higher creativity scores than non-players, providing correlational support. Karwowski and Soszynski (2008), actually designed a creativity training course inspired by TRPGs called Role Play Training in Creativity (RPTC). Although they modified how TRPGs work for their experiment, RPTC had promising results in cognitive creativity that compare favorably to the methods examined by Scott et al. (2004).
What remains to be done is to examine TRPGs to discover what aspects of them, in any, actually enhance creativity. Correlation is not causation, and while Karwowski and Soszynski’s 2008 study is a good indicator that TRPGs influence creativity, it is far from definite. Clarifications are in order. Nobody has yet to attempt to influence emotional creativity scores at all, in any form, so there is a need to test ways to influence it experimentally.
1.3 Purpose of the Study
The purpose of this study was to use a pure TRPG medium to enhance the cognitive and emotional creativity scores of young-adults in a Taiwanese college.
Cognitive creativity training has been examined rather thoroughly in the literature, but whether a pure TRPG effects cognitive creativity is uncertain and should be clarified.
Although it can be hypothesized that its connection to drama would elicit changes in emotional creativity, no study thus far has investigated this question, so this study seeks to
rectify that. Emotional creativity training has never before been attempted, but it has to start somewhere. Taiwan, full of ethnic Chinese, is as good a place as any to ensure that results can be applied to as many people as possible.
In order to test the ability of TRPGs to enhance the creativity scores of Taiwanese college students, this study made use of a traditional experimental design. It drew on a sample of Taiwanese students from universities in Taipei, and separated them into a control group and an experimental group. Both groups received pretests and posttests on cognitive creativity and emotional creativity. The experimental group received four treatments distributed over five weeks where they played a TRPG. Data was analyzed using quantitative statistical methods after the experiment was complete. It is hypothesized that both cognitive and emotional creativity will be significantly improved in the experimental group, but not the control group.
1.4 Research Questions
Specifically, this study’s questions can be phrased as the following:
1. What are the effects of playing a TRPG on the cognitive creativity scores of Taiwanese college students?
2. What are the effects of playing a TRPG on the emotional creativity scores of Taiwanese college students?
1.5 Significance to the Field
If TRPGs are shown to be an enhancer of creativity, which specific qualities of TRPGs boost creativity can then be identified and enhanced in future research. However, the most important contribution is that this is the first attempt to measure the effect of a
treatment on both cognitive creativity and emotional creativity. It is also the first experiment to measure the effect of a treatment on emotional creativity at all. Thus, whether the results are statistically significant or not, exploring how to manipulate emotional creativity is an important first step in its research.
This study is also the first experiment using TRPGs in any capacity in creativity training that makes use of a control group. The only previous experimental study (Karwowski & Soszynski, 2008) had no control or contrast group, and thus was subject to measurement error.
1.6 Definitions
In this section, certain words that may be unfamiliar to the reader will be clearly defined.
Creativity. This study focuses on the potential of one to produce creative achievements, and is further broken up into cognitive and emotional creativity.
Cognitive Creativity. Cognitive creativity is the creative potential that leads to the production of ideas. In this study, cognitive creativity is measured by the Traditional Chinese version of the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults (ATTA) (Chen, 2006). Its sub-scales include fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration. Fluency is the number of ideas generated, flexibility is the number of categories the ideas fit into, originality is how outside the norm any given idea is, and elaboration is the amount of detail provided for each individual idea.
Emotional Creativity. Emotional creativity is the potential that leads to the production of emotions and emotional reactions. In this study this is measured by Traditional Chinese version of the Emotional Creativity Index (ECI) (Lee, 2009）. Its sub-scales include preparedness, novel origins, novelty, and effectiveness. Preparedness is how ready the subject is to feel an emotion, and whether they’re ready to analyze what feeling
is appropriate. Novel origins is the tendency of the subject to seek out and identify new emotional reactions, or novel uses of emotion. Novelty means that one can apply an emotional reaction to a situation where a different reaction would normally be used.
Effectiveness is the ability to judge which emotion in any given situation would be best.
Tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs). TRPGs are a form of game where participants play the role of characters in a story. The participants then cooperate together to create a unique and engaging story that places their characters as the protagonists. Here tabletop means that it is played in person rather than online, and that all aspects of the game must be imagined by the participants. TRPGs must have at least two participants, and one of them is the game-master. TRPGs is the plural form of the phrase whereas TRPG is the singular.
Game-master (GM). A GM is a special participant of a TRPG. GMs are typically unique to the group in that while many people may be playing the game, only one is the GM. GMs decide the consequences of attempted actions, the overall structure of the story, and the decisions and actions of characters not controlled by other participants. They are similar to a producer in a film.
Player. Player, in this document, will always refer to people engaged in playing a TRPG but who are not GMs. Players control the feelings and attempted actions of a single character. They are similar to actors and actresses in film and theater, and during play are expected to speak and behave as their character would.
Story module. Sometimes referred to simply as the module, these are effectively story scaffolding. Rather than burden GMs with completely open-ended story creation, story modules provide guidelines and ideas to help GMs. They do not provide the entirety of a story and do not read like a novel, rather they are the working outline of a story. GMs and players work together to fill in the details. Outside of this experiment, modules are frequently used by TRPG GMs who do not have the time or motivation to generate an
entire original plotline on their own. Thus, their inclusion does not differ from how TRPGs are typically played. The pamphlet “How to Play TRPGs” is Appendix B, and includes examples of how to use the story modules.
1.7 Ethical Considerations
In this study, all participants were complete volunteers and were informed they could leave at any time. Even if the participant quit the experiment early, their time was still compensated (only one person quit). The participants were never lied to or manipulated, and the largest danger was a small threat of papercuts. In communications to the participants, names and contact information for other participants was never revealed.
Further, scoring removed the names of the subjects, effectively making their scores anonymous.
The room where the experiment was conducted was borrowed with permission from the Department of Educational Psychology and Counseling at National Taiwan Normal University. The Chinese version of the Emotional Creativity Index was reproduced and used with the written permission of the localizer, Lee, Jo-Yu. A copy of her permission is included in Appendix E.