Defining and Teaching Creativity

Before teaching creativity can be considered, it is important to first define what exactly it is. Unfortunately, this task is epic in proportion. Runco’s book Creativity:

Theories and themes: Research, development, and practice (2007) spends a great number of pages addressing this subject, because according to Runco “there may be more cognitive theories of creativity than any other kind of theory.” (p. 1-2) One way to sneak up on a definition of creativity is to work at it backwards, through defining what people consider to be creative responses. Once a creative response is defined, then promoting those responses is related to creativity.

Averill (1999) defines creativity by its outcomes. He lists three conditions that must all be satisfied at some level for something to be considered creative. The first is novelty.

A response or product must be original and novel to be considered creative. Thus how creative something is can be judged on how many people consider it novel: it may be novel to an individual but because everyone else is already doing it, nobody else would judge it creative. The second is effectiveness. To put it simply, if an otherwise novel idea is totally useless, it isn’t creative, it’s crazy or inappropriate. The final criterion is authenticity.

Averill believes creativity is from the self, and so must originate there—it can’t be copied from someone or something else. Authentic creations are therefore original as well as novel. Copying a painting abroad and bringing it home may result in people thinking the painting novel (they hadn’t seen it before) and effective (it’s pretty), but even if one falsely claims it as his own it would not be a creative work: it would be not be original or authentic.

Averill’s definition for creative outcomes can be applied to cognitive creativity, but it can also be applied to more affective responses. Averill has worked extensively to develop emotional creativity as an idea (Averill & Nunley, 1992) from a social-constructionist view of emotion (Averill, 1980), and has differentiated it clearly from emotional intelligence (Averill, 2004). So he states it best when he defines its various forms as:

At the lowest level, emotional creativity involves the particularly effective application of an already existing emotion, one found within the culture; at a more complex level, it involves the modification (‘‘sculpting’’) of a standard emotion to better meet the needs of individual or group; and at the highest level, it involves the

development of a new form of emotion, based on a change in the beliefs and rules by which emotions are constituted. (Averill, 1999, p. 334)

Emotions, then, can be considered creative products in their own right, especially if they meet the same three criteria as cognitively creative products. Averill goes on to say that emotional creativity has three main facets: preparedness, novelty, and effectiveness/authenticity (1999). Two have already been explained. Authenticity and effectiveness were combined because, although theoretically different, a factor analysis of Averill’s measure for emotional creativity, the Emotional Creativity Index (ECI), showed them to correlate very strongly.

Preparedness was included because novelty, effectiveness, and authenticity all relate to only the final stage of the creative process. Averill believes that the initial stage of the creative process, preparation, is also important for judging somebody’s cognitive and emotional creative capacity. Basically, if one can’t get started, then how to judge an outcome won’t even matter. Averill pulls extensively from Bloch (1993) for an example of how one can be prepared emotionally. As Bloch says, in method acting, actors train to experience as well as express emotions to better portray their characters. Averill (1999) simply points out that all of humanity undergoes some degree of informal training in this regard, and that we are all socialized to know how to feel in various situations. In sum, according to Averill, emotions, even though they are produced through an affective rather than a cognitive process, are and can still be judged as creative products, even using the same criteria for judgment. Further, he strongly implies that differences in emotional creativity could be because of inherent ability and training, rather than just natural talent.

Therefore, even if creativity can’t be defined with extreme precision, it can still be measured via its outcomes. That is, the traits of people who reliably generate products and actions that others deem creative can be measured.

Runco, Millar, Acar, and Cramond (2010) founded one of the most common measures of creativity, the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) to be a highly accurate method of predicting creative outcomes. The TTCT itself measured four aspects of creativity: fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration. Fluency is the number of ideas one can produce; flexibility is how many different categories those ideas can fit into;

originality is how unusual those ideas are; and elaboration is how well detailed the products of creativity become (Guilford, 1967, and Torrance, 1969, as cited in Almeida, Prieto, Ferrando, Oliveira, and Ferrándiz, 2008). Fifty years before Runco et al’s 2010 study, a group of people took part in a longitudinal study where the TTCT was used to measure their creative potential. There was a follow up in 1998 on the group, but prior to their study there had not been another comparison in the past ten years. The objective of Runco et al, then, was to see how well the TTCT predicted actual creative accomplishments in the lifetime of those it measured. Their results show that at least some part of creativity is effectively measured by TTCT: the TTCT scores predicted 40 percent of the variance of actual creative achievements, public and private. The measure may not be perfectly precise, but it is certainly useful. Because it can predict outcomes, the TTCT can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of creativity training even if an operational, outcome-based definition of cognitive creativity is used. Unfortunately, the TTCT relies exclusively on the cognitive production of creative ideas to measure creativity. Thinking of different, creative ideas and novel solutions to problems are all cognitive processes. Thus, it cannot be used to measure emotional creativity.

To date only Averill and Thomas-Knowles (1991, as cited in Fuchs, Kumar, &

Porter, 2007)’s Emotional Creativity Index (ECI) measures emotional creativity. Averill

(1999) conducted a series of six studies to see if the ECI had validity. Of particular interest to this study is Averill’s second experiment, where peers were asked to judge each other in emotional creativity after the criteria were explained to them, and each participant completed the ECI. The study was designed to see if high and low scores on the ECI could be judged by peers through simple observation. In other words, does having a high ECI score mean someone produces observably more creative emotions in daily life?

Participants were asked to choose individuals they knew and pair them up with one another.

For each pair, the participant judged one of the two to have higher emotional creativity than the other. After judging, the participants had their acquaintances complete the ECI.

The experimenters then analyzed how accurately the participants were able to predict which acquaintances had higher ECI scores. The judgments made by participants were found to be accurate, and predicted actual ECI scores. Averill concluded that the ECI is not just theoretical or based on inaccurate introspection: ECI scores can be associated with everyday behavior, observable by peers.

The ECI can also be used to predict creative products: in a separate set of studies Gutbezahl and Averill (1996) found that when study participants produced narratives about emotionally challenging events, drew pictures of emotions, and wrote stories about emotionally ambiguous situations, that those with high ECI’s expressed the emotions with more creativity in all three artistic mediums. Therefore, both emotional creativity can also be operationally measured and defined via its outcomes.

The ECI further has been tested on a Taiwanese sample. Jo-Yu Lee (2009) found through an exploratory factor analysis of the ECI that the ECI measured four factors:

preparedness, novel origins, novel reactions, and effectiveness. She then further supported these findings with a confirmatory factor analysis. 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 is very similar to cognitive creativity’s novelty. Here it 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.

Using measures linked to predictors of creative outcomes, what types of creativity training have been shown to improve creativity? Scott, Leritz, and Mumford (2004) performed a very in-depth meta-analysis of creativity training, including 70 studies on a large variety of different approaches. They found that all of the approaches resulted in positive effects on creativity. This presents very strong evidence that cognitive creativity can be taught. Of all of these approaches, the strongest effects were elicited from divergent thinking and problem solving methods.

Divergent thinking is “the capacity to generate multiple alternative solutions as opposed to the one correct solution.” (p. 363, Scott et al., 2004) This is typically measured in ways similar to (or identical to) the TTCT, as described above. As measures such as used on the TTCT have been linked to creative achievement, divergent thinking tasks are frequently used when designing creativity courses. Scott et al. then showed that using divergent thinking in creativity training truly was highly effective. Most divergent thinking tests include providing a scenario or item and asking the student to come up with as many answers as possible. For example, on the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults (ATTA), students are asked to list all the different problems one may run into after gaining the power of flight. TRPGs can easily incorporate divergent thinking tasks by offering similar fantastical situations: when obvious solutions are removed, players are encouraged to think,

“in what ways can we use our current resources to solve this problem?” and thus lists of ideas are produced and evaluated naturally.

Problem solving similarly is an important part of cognitive creativity. According to Mumford, Peterson, and Childs (1999) the problem solving process can be divided into

eight steps: information gathering, information organization, synthesis/reorganization, and then idea generation, idea evaluation, implementation planning, and solution appraisal. As Scott et al. (2004) point out, this conceptual model is highly relevant to creativity training because many parts have been linked to creative performance and problem solving. They give references for problem finding (Getzels & Csikszentmihalyi, 1976; Okuda, Runco, &

Berger, 1991; Rostan, 1994), conceptual combination (Baughman & Mumford, 1995;

Finke, Ward, & Smith, 1992), and idea evaluation (Basadur, Runco, & Vega, 2000; Runco

& Chand, 1994) specifically. In all of the methods evaluated by Scott et al’s meta analysis (2004), problem solving had the strongest positive effect on creativity, even above divergent thinking. Thus it is important to note that all of these processes in problem solving are present in situations simulated in role-playing, should problems be presented.

In almost all ways, problem solving in TRPGs is identical to the real-life problem solving process, and so TRPGs should serve as excellent practice for problem-solving skills.

Although some of the studies Scott et al. included in their meta-analysis incorporated some emotional elements of creativity in their training, such as motivational approaches, all of them only judged cognitive outcomes. No studies were found in the literature that focused on emotional creativity training and its outcomes. However, when designing creativity training, it should be possible to judge its effectiveness using the ECI in a similar way to the TTCT. The TTCT predicts cognitive creative outcomes, and therefore it can be used to judge the general effectiveness of cognitive creativity training.

The ECI can predict emotionally creative outcomes, so creativity training with affective components theoretically should also increase scores on the ECI. Averill (1999) drew from drama theory to explain how people receive informal training in emotional creativity. It may be supposed, then, that a training method that makes use of dramatic techniques could elevate one’s emotional creativity. Role-play is one such method.

To summarize, for the purposes of this study, the definition of creativity is an operational one because of the ultimate goal of creativity training: producing outcomes that are both more creative and more numerous. Because the TTCT and the ECI have both been shown to predict creative achievements, in the TTCT even 50 years later, they are both suitable to this purpose. Because studies have shown emotional creativity to be a distinct construct from cognitive creativity, the ECI offers an excellent additional tool to measure the overall effectiveness of any new creativity training method.