How to be more creative, according to psychology

From keeping dream diaries to using particular emotional regulation strategies, here’s the research on how to boost creativity, digested.

02 May 2023

By Emily Reynolds


Engaging in creative activities has significant benefits. Creative forms of therapy can have a positive impact on those with depression, dementia, and bipolar disorder, for example. Outside of therapeutic settings, too, creativity has numerous upsides: it has been associated with greater innovation, for instance, and may even increase mental clarity.

Creativity, then, can make our lives better in a multitude of ways, as well as being an end in itself. But how do we increase our levels of creativity?

From keeping dream diaries to using particular emotional regulation strategies, here’s the research on how to boost creativity, digested.
Consciously push yourself to be creative

We often view creativity as something we have to let ourselves express naturally rather than something that can be forced. But one study found that receiving an instruction to be creative can, perhaps counter to this assumption, actually boost our creativity.

The team asked a number of jazz pianists to improvise a piano track as they would normally. They were then instructed to play three more times, and before one of these performances were told to “improvise even more creatively than your past performance(s)”. For participants who were relatively inexperienced, this instruction seemed to work: independent judges described their improvisations as “more proficient, aesthetically appealing, and creative” than their previous attempts.

The team suggests that the command to be more creative led these pianists to put conscious effort into trying new ways of playing. However, participants with more experience didn’t get the same benefit from this instruction, perhaps because they were already such expert improvisers that their technique couldn’t improve with greater conscious control.

So if you’re looking to boost creativity, especially if you’re an amateur, making a conscious effort may help.
Work with someone creative

If you want to be creative at work, you might hope for a manager who is organised and detail-oriented, so that you have the freedom to innovate knowing somebody else is keeping their eye on the ball.

But one study suggests that being led by a creative person can help boost your own creativity. Writing in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Auburn University researchers found that employees actually produce more creative outcomes, and feel their creativity is being fostered more, when their managers have greater confidence in their own creativity. These effects were stronger when team members had a good relationship with their manager.

The creativity of managers was self-reported, rather than measured objectively; thus, the actual creativity of managers seems less important than their own confidence in it. Looking for environments in which we have the opportunity to be managed by people who are assured of their creativity may, however, provide us with some encouragement to indulge our own creative impulses.
Reappraise emotional events

The ability to reappraise emotional events is an important way of regulating our emotions, giving us a chance to re-evaluate what has happened in a more positive way. Reinterpreting situations can allow us to ‘psych ourselves up’ when feeling unconfident, for example, or make ourselves feel calmer when we’re under stress. And one study found that using this technique – which itself is a creative endeavour – can also increase our creativity more broadly.

In several studies looking at the link between emotional reappraisal and creativity, the team showed that the more people reappraised situations as a form of emotional regulation, as opposed to other strategies like suppressing emotions, the more creative they generally were.

This relationship depended on participants’ openness, a trait which is associated with being curious and open-minded. In one part of the study, some participants were encouraged to be open by writing about things that highlighted the benefit of new experiences, while others wrote about experiences that confirmed their existing beliefs.

When openness was low, people were more creative after using appraisal – but when it was high, creativity wasn’t affected by the emotional regulation strategies people used. This suggests that reappraisal encourages you to think creatively, compensating for the lack of creativity linked with low openness.
Keep a dream diary

Our dreams are often filled with wild imagery, far more surreal than we would think of in our waking lives. It tracks, therefore, that recording our dreams could help increase our creativity. That’s exactly what a 2017 study published in the Journal of Creative Behaviour found.

In the study, 55 participants wrote down their dreams every day for four weeks, while a control group of 32 participants just wrote about a vivid event from the previous day. At the beginning and end of the diary period, the participants also noted how often they remembered their dreams. They also completed a creativity test which involved creating new pictures out of sparse line drawings.

By the end of the study, both groups showed an increase in certain elements of creativity, such as the number of ideas they came up with or the degree of extra details they added to the drawings. However, the dream logging participants also showed an improvement in other aspects of creativity, such as an increase in the emotional expressiveness of the images, the presence of narrative and humour, and the richness of the imagery.

Writing down our dreams could, therefore, be a simple way of encouraging creativity.
Forget perfection - strive for excellence

Striving for perfection can boost academic achievement – but it can also impact our mental health, making us more susceptible to burnout. And a British Journal of Psychology study identified another downside of perfectionism: it can decrease our creativity.

The research looked at how creativity was related to people’s tendency to strive for excellence or perfection. Participants who strived for excellence – agreeing with statements like “My goal is to perform very well at school” – performed better in a task where they generated as many creative answers as they could to several questions including “tell us the different ways you could use a newspaper” and “name all the things you can think of that make noise”.. Those who strived more for perfection – agreeing with statements like “My goal at school is to be exceptionally productive all the time” – wrote down fewer original ideas and scored lower on open to experience.

It is unclear in which direction this relationship works: striving for excellence may not be the cause of creativity, but a trait that creative people have already. Still, the results suggest that although looking for perfection can be tempting when engaging in creative activities, looking instead for excellence could bring us closer to our goals – and protect us from anxiety and burnout too.

SOURCE:

https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/how-be-more-creative-according-psychology(accessed 9.5.23)

An over-abundance of toys may stifle toddler creativity

When my kids were toddlers, there were caches of easily-accessible toys in most rooms of our house. But perhaps I should have kept most of them stored away, and brought just a few out at a time, on rotation – because the results of a new study in Infant Behaviour and Development suggest that a toddler with few toy options not only spends longer playing with each one – presumably developing their attentional skills – but is also more creative in their play.



Carly Dauch at the University of Toledo, US, and her colleagues studied 36 toddlers, aged between 18 and 30 months. The researchers drew from a pool of 32 toys of four types: educational toys (that teach colours, for example), “pretend” toys (that suggested themed scenarios – perhaps playing a being a doctor, for instance), action toys (that required an action such as stacking or building from the toddler, for example) and vehicles. The researchers videoed the toddlers taking part in two, 15-minute supervised play sessions: in one, they were in a room with one toy from each category (so four toys in total) and in the other, there were four from each category (so 16 in total).

The researchers found that when they presented the toddlers with 16 toys, the toddlers played on average with half of them during the assessment. In contrast, when they presented them with just four toys, the kids played on average with three.

Most importantly, the amount of toys available seemed to affect the way the toddlers played. When only four toys were on offer, each of the, on average, 10 play “incidents” lasted longer – around two minutes – compared with about a minute each for the, on average, 20 play incidents in the 16-toy condition. With fewer toys, the children also came up with about 60 per cent more different ways of interacting with each toy (such as “pretending”, “inserting”, “stacking”, etc).

Sixteen toys are more distracting than four, the authors conclude. Fewer available toys allow a child to focus more on a toy, to explore it more thoroughly, and to discover different ways of using it. Given evidence that young children can benefit from attention training, “an environment that presents fewer distractions may provide toddlers [with] the opportunity to exercise their intrinsic attention capabilities,” the researchers write.

Certainly, many kids in the US and the UK, for example, are not exactly short on toys. In the UK, the toy market is worth around £3.5 billion annually, while in the US, around US$3.1 billion is spent on toys specifically for infants and pre-schoolers every year. One study of American middle class family homes reported that, on average, 139 toys were visible, with most homes having at least 100 and some as many as 250. Given these numbers, “potential disruption in play created by an abundance of toys may be even more apparent within a naturalistic environment,” the researchers write.

However, the toys used in this study did not belong to the children involved. As anyone who’s ever taken a young child to the house of another – and witnessed the subsequent play frenzy – knows, unfamiliar toys are far more exciting, and distracting than familiar ones. It isn’t very surprising that the toddlers in the 16-toy condition checked out as many as they could, as quickly as they could.

Of course, one way to stop young kids getting quickly bored of their toys is to restrict access to them. If hiding away most toys and making only a few available at any one time helps toddlers to develop their attentional skills – and be more creative in their play – and increases the odds that you’ll be able to walk through the living room without tripping over – surely it’s the way to go.

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2018/04/09/an-over-abundance-of-toys-may-stifle-toddler-creativity/(15.5.18)

How keeping a dream diary could boost your creativity

For me, dreams and creativity have always been wound tightly together. As a teenager leafing through my dad’s Heavy Metal comic strip anthologies, it was Little Nemo in Slumberland (about a character who has fantastic dreams) that stunned me the most. When I became a psychology researcher, I was fascinated with altered states and formed a short-lived dream research group with my fellow PhD students – somnambulant life seemed so mysterious, and the then-received wisdom that dreams were just brain static was becoming untenable. Today, outside of my science hours, I perform improvisational theatre, most intensively with The Dreaming, a surrealistic troupe mimicking dream-logic. And in recent years, I’ve made my sporadic dream-logging into a habit (tip: keep a voice recorder by your bed and capture everything you can without worrying about sense or structure). Could this habit make me more creative? According to new research published in the Journal of Creative Behavior, it could.



Together with my own sense that dreams feed creativity, there are a number of anecdotes that press the same message: Mendeleev’s discovery of the periodic table, Elias Howe’s conception of the lock-stitch sewing machine, Descarte’s road to the scientific method and James Cameron’s ideas for The Terminator, were all apparently inspired by dreams. What’s more, evidence suggests that greater dream recall is correlated with measures of creativity. This could simply be because creative people remember their dreams better (maybe finding them more interesting). To show that dream recall actually benefits creativity you really need an experimental setup, which is just what Mauricio Sierra-Siegert and his team at the Colegiatura Colombiana attempted.

The researchers asked their undergraduate sample to twice complete a measure of creativity, 27 days apart. The measure, the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, involves working ambiguous visual fragments into full pictures, which judges then rate for their creative content. For example, someone might work a couple of isolated curves into the number eight, a snowman, or an intricate snaking hydra with faces depicting different political figures.

In the days between the assessments, 55 of the participants spent time each morning writing up the dream content they could remember from the night before. A 32-strong control group wrote instead about a vivid event from the previous day.

At the beginning and end of the study, the participants also reported how often they remembered their dreams. Those in the dream condition who started out remembering the fewest dreams – the bottom third of the group – showed an increase, from remembering one dream a month to one a week on average, suggesting that the dream diary exercise had been effective (the lowest scorers on dream recall in the control group also showed an increase during the course of the study, perhaps due to “regression to the mean”, but their increase was not as great as that shown by participants in the dream condition).

Did keeping a dream diary lead to a creativity boost? The Torrance test of creativity can be scored in terms of “raw” features like the volume of ideas, degree of extra details, and abstractness of titles of the drawings, and although the dream loggers showed an improvement in these raw scores, so did the control group (and indeed, so too did a third, non-intervention group who simply took the test twice, suggesting a benefit to performance owing simply to practice).

But the test can also be scored by evaluating more closely the content of the images, rating qualities such as the degree of emotional expressiveness, presence of narrative to the imagery, humour, richness of imagery and presence of fantasy. These are the sort of creative elements commonly associated with dreams, and indeed, the dream-logging participants showed improvements in their creative content scores whereas the control participants did not.

By repeatedly bringing their waking-state attention back to the workings of dream consciousness, Sierra-Siegert and his colleagues suggest the participants in the dream diary condition were encouraging a “cross-fertilization” between the two modes, making more accessible the creative leaps and elaboration common to dreams. Repeated referral to dream content similarly characterised the explorative leaps of the surrealists, and many of our most distinctive film-makers, from David Lynch to Christopher Nolan, blend or explore elements across these boundaries to create their work. If you desire to be creative along these lines, it seems worth paying attention to what your dream life has to offer.

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/08/31/how-keeping-a-dream-diary-could-boost-your-creativity/(accessed 22.9.17)

Is creativity something you inherit from your parents?

Jeb Bush’s failure to secure a Presidential triple-play is memorable perhaps because it’s an exception to a familiar routine: the family dynasty. It’s a routine especially common in the arts, where a writer’s family tree is apt to contain a couple of actors, a director, and maybe a flower arranger to boot. This might simply reflect upbringing – or maybe the powers of nepotism – but creative success also owes to temperament and talents, some of which may have their origins in our genetic makeup. The journal Behavioural Genetics has recently published a heritability study that explores how deeply a creative vocation sits in our DNA.



Mark Roeling and his colleagues at Oxford and Vrije universities, drew on data from the Netherlands Twin Register, covering around 1800 monozygotic (identical) twins who share the same genes, and 1600 dizygotic or non-identical twins who have only 50 per cent of their DNA in common, just like non-twin siblings. The register includes information on the twins’ professions, which were coded as artistic if they fell into the categories of dance, film, music, theatre, visual arts, or writing. This applied to 233 of the individuals on the register.

The question that Roeling and his colleagues were interested in was: if an individual has an artistic profession, how likely is it that their twin does too? If the answer is the same for monozygotic and dizygotic pairs, then this would suggest genes exert no effect on the likelihood of entering a creative career – it’s all nurture. Stronger creative overlap among the identical twins, by contrast, would suggest more of a role for nature.

The team found that there was more similarity in the careers of identical twins than non-identical twins. If one identical twin had a creative career, there was a .68 per cent chance that their sibling would do too (where 1 would mean the other twin always had a creative profession), compared with a probability of just .4 for a creative non-identical twin. This difference between identical and non-identical twins suggests that genes have a fairly large say in whether you go into a creative profession. After adjusting the results using data from non-twin siblings, the researchers estimated that the heritability of being in a creative profession is 0.7: in other words, in attempting to understand why some individuals in the sample ended up in creative careers and others didn’t, the researchers think that 70 per cent of this difference is attributable to genetic influences.

It’s worth looking at other recent studies to put this in context. Also working with data from the Netherlands Twin Register, a different research group led by Anna Vinkhuyzen at VU University found high levels of heritability (.83 ) for creative writing, including letters, manuscripts and books, but somewhat lower heritability (.56) for a fairly broad category of ‘arts’ comprising painting and acting. Meanwhile, another group headed by Christian Kandler at Universität Bielefeld used German datasets to find another reasonably large heritability estimate (.62) for “perceived” creativity, that is how highly participants rated themselves as creative or how creative they were rated by their peers.

These earlier findings tended to rely on self-report measures of participants’ thoughts on their own creativity. Kandler found a much lower heritability of .26 for what he calls “figural” creativity, measured by objective tests, such as completing partial line drawings to create objects judged as especially clear and original. This links into earlier findings that suggested there are two dimensions to creativity: one a subjective sense of “being a creative” (or wanting to be), which tends to correlate with higher scores on the personality traits of Openness and Extraversion, and the other, actual creative ability, which tends to correlate with intelligence and can be objectively assessed through tests, such as those used in Kandler’s research on figural creativity.

The current study’s heritability of .70 finds better company among the creativity self-report measures than the much weaker heritability suggested for pure creative ability. This makes it plausible that the substantial influence that genetics appears to have on creative professions may not just be about pure creative ability, but also about the other personal characteristics that are needed to make an artistic life, such as determination and self-belief. Further work that looks at the heritability of artistic attainments would be one way of exploring this, as would looking at time spent on creative pursuits, inside or outside of a main profession. After all, to be creative professionally takes a fair amount of luck and circumstance. To be creative in life, however, just requires you to make it a priority.

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/01/16/is-creativity-something-you-inherit-from-your-parents/(accessed 1.2.17)

Five ways to be more creative

Sometimes it can be hard work being creative whereas other times inspiration will hit without warning

Most people aspire to be creative and have an original insight which makes them stand out from the crowd.

But is creativity a random process or is it something that can be nurtured and triggered using a variety of techniques? Scientists around the world are exploring what happens in the brain preceding that 'eureka' moment.

Their research suggests these five things could help you unleash your creative side.

Do things differently

If you want to come up with innovative solutions to a problem which is bothering you, then doing something as simple as changing aspects of your daily routine could lead to a creative insight.

Psychologist Dr Simone Ritter from Radboud University Nijmegen has found that even just changing the way you make your usual sandwich can help boost levels of creativity.

She says people should seek out unexpected experiences if they wish to think differently and so approach problems with a fresh perspective.

Altering your daily routines can result in changes happening in your brain.

Well-travelled neural pathways are abandoned and new connections made between brain cells. This can then lead to new and original ideas.

Cut distractions

Another option is to remove all distractions if you wish to try to trigger an epiphany.

Psychologists also often use a simple brick to test people's creativity.

What alternative things could you do with a common brick?

If you are able to come up with many different ideas, then it's likely that you're a divergent thinker.

Prolific children's author Roald Dahl allowed very few people into his famous garden writing hut, while Jonathan Franzen famously wrote his 2001 novel The Corrections at times wearing earplugs, earmuffs and a blindfold.

You can also try to train your brain to cut out distractions.

Neuroscientists believe moments of insight occur in the right side of the brain in an area near the front called the anterior superior temporal gyrus. Research suggests there is a significant increase in high energy brain waves (called gamma waves) which erupt from this spot when that eureka moment occurs.

Prof John Kounios from Drexel University says that just before that happens, there is a burst of alpha waves - which are associated with relaxation - in the back of the head.

People take in a lot of information visually but these alpha waves allow the brain to take a slight break - much like what happens when you blink your eyes.

This then allows this very faint idea to bubble up to the surface as an insight.

Prof Kounios adds: "When you ask someone a difficult question, you'll often notice that they'll look away or they might even close their eyes or look down. They will look anywhere but at your face which is very distracting."

If your attention is directed inwardly you are more likely to solve a problem with a flash of insight.

Work on mundane tasks

Dr Rex Jung explains how white matter plays a crucial role in creativity

Another activity to help you trigger your creative brain waves could be to work on something that requires minimal thought.

Prof Jonathan Schooler from the University of California, Santa Barbara explains: "If you are stumped, take a break. Allow the unconscious processes to take hold. But rather than just sitting there, you might want to take a walk or a shower or do something like gardening."

Gregor Mendel, often described as the "father of genetics", spent years patiently counting and studying pea plants and honeybees.

Underappreciated during his lifetime, he was the first to uncover the laws of heredity.

Don't be afraid to improvise and take risks

Rahsaan Roland Kirk was a blind jazz musician whose ability to freestyle was renowned

Dr Charles Limb from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine says everyone is creative even if they do not realise it.

"If people think about their daily behaviour - most of it is unscripted. Most of it is improvised. They don't actually plan every second what they are going to do," he says.

He says jazz musicians, along with freestyle rappers, illustrators and cartoonists experience changes in an area at the front of their brain called the prefrontal cortex when improvising.

He said: "It's the portion of the brain which kind of makes us human. We saw a shutdown of the pre-frontal cortex in these musicians."

These types of people are less likely to feel they have to monitor their behaviour and so are more likely to take a risk.

Just let your mind wander

Famous eureka moments

Charles Darwin was reading Thomas Malthus's Essay on Population for amusement when he was able to crystallise his theory of natural selection.

Greek polymath Archimedes is long associated with the term 'eureka' which is what he is supposed to have said after discovering the principle of buoyancy while in the bath.

The inspiration for Post It notes came about when3M chemist Arthur Fry tried to find a bookmark for his hymn book in church. He realised he could use a special adhesive invented by his colleague Spencer Silver to make a marker.

Media mogul Oprah Winfrey popularised the concept of an 'Aha' moment - meaning the exact realisation someone has when they need to change their life - with her talk show and magazine.

Radio Times: 50 Great British Inventions

BBC Lab UK: How musical are you?

Dr Rex Jung from the University of New Mexico has also observed that when people are engaged in the creative process, there is a distinct change in the frontal lobes.

When there is less activity in the frontal lobes, it is more likely that you can come up with an original idea.

Dr Jung describes the phenomenon as "transient hypofrontality."

He says it is possible to trigger this temporary brain state by meditating or taking a long run.

He adds it is all about what's happening with the white matter in the brain - an intricate wiring system which is formed of more than 150,000km worth of connections.

Your idea may also have been rumbling around in your unconscious mind for a while before you become aware of it, so while that 'aha moment' may feel instantaneous, as the research shows, a lot happens before you are even aware of it.

According to Dr Jung's research, inventive brains are less packed and organised and so nerve traffic is slowed down. This gives the opportunity for more unusual connections to be made even if it takes a little while to do so.

If it happened to Charles Darwin, it could happen to you.

SOURCE:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/0/21660191 (accessed 12.4.14)