Creativity - WikiHQ

thumb|upright=0.7|alt=graphic of a lightbulb|A picture of an [[incandescent light bulb, a symbol associated with the formation of an idea, an example of creativity]]

Creativity is the ability to generate novel and valuable ideas or works through the exercise of imagination. The products of creativity may be classified as either intangible or physical. Intangible products of creativity include ideas, scientific theories, literary works, musical compositions, and jokes. Physical products of creativity include inventions, dishes or meals, pieces of jewelry, costumes, and paintings.

Creativity may also describe the ability to find new solutions to problems or new methods to accomplish a goal. Therefore, creativity enables people to solve problems in new ways.

Most ancient cultures (including Ancient Greece, Ancient China, and Ancient India) lacked the concept of creativity, seeing art as a form of discovery rather than a form of creation. In the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, creativity is seen as the sole province of God, and human creativity was considered an expression of God's work; the modern conception of creativity came about during the Renaissance, influenced by humanist ideas.

Scholarly interest in creativity is found in several disciplines, primarily psychology, business studies, and cognitive science. It is also present in education and the humanities (including philosophy and the arts).

Etymology

The English word "creativity" comes from the Latin term (meaning "to create"). Its derivational suffixes also come from Latin, such as the etymological root “crescere”, which means “to let things grow”. This aspect of creativity is emphasized more in indigenous and Eastern concepts of creativity. The word "create" appeared in English as early as the 14th century—notably in Chaucer's The Parson's Tale to indicate divine creation. The modern meaning of creativity in reference to human creation did not emerge until after the Age of Enlightenment.

Definition

In a summary of scientific research into creativity, psychology professor Michael Mumford wrote, "We seem to have reached a general agreement that creativity involves the production of novel, useful products." Similarly, in psychologist Robert Sternberg's words, creativity produces "something original and worthwhile".

Authors have diverged dramatically in their precise definitions beyond these general commonalities: social geographer Peter Meusburger estimated that over a hundred different definitions can be found in the literature. One definition given by Dr. E. Paul Torrance in the context of assessing an individual's creative ability is "a process of becoming sensitive to problems, deficiencies, gaps in knowledge, missing elements, disharmonies; identifying the difficulty; searching for solutions, making guesses, or formulating hypotheses about the deficiencies: testing and retesting these hypotheses and possibly modifying and retesting them; and finally communicating the results."

Philosophy professor Ignacio L. Götz, following the etymology of the word, argued that creativity is not necessarily "making". He confined it to the act of creating without thinking about the end product. While many definitions of creativity seem almost synonymous with originality, Götz also emphasized the difference between creativity and originality. Götz asserted that one can be creative without necessarily being original. When someone creates something, they are certainly creative at that point, but they may not be original in the sense that their creation is not something new. while the OECD and Eurostat stated that "innovation is more than a new idea or an invention; an innovation requires implementation, either by being put into active use or by being made available for use by other parties, firms, individuals, or organizations."

There is also emotional creativity, which is described as a pattern of cognitive abilities and personality traits related to originality and appropriateness in emotional experience.

From an interdisciplinary point a view, creativity can serve to increase neuronal connectivity, cognitive and emotional coherence as well as social cohesion. In this respect, creativity can help to cope with despair, hate and violence.

Conceptual history

thumb|upright=0.7|right|Greek philosophers like Plato rejected the concept of creativity, preferring to see art as a form of discovery. When asked in [[Republic (Plato)|The Republic, "Will we say, of a painter, that he makes something?", Plato answers, "Certainly not, he merely imitates."]]

Ancient

Most ancient cultures, including Ancient Greece, Ancient China, and Ancient India, lacked the concept of creativity, seeing art as a form of discovery and not creation. The ancient Greeks had no terms for "to create" or "creator" except for the expression (to make), which only applied to (poetry) and to the (poet, or "maker", who made it). Plato did not believe in art as a form of creation. He asks in the Republic, "Will we say of a painter that he makes something?" He answers, "Certainly not, he merely imitates."

It is commonly argued that the notion of "creativity" originated in Western cultures through Christianity, as a matter of divine inspiration. A similar concept existed in Greek culture, where the Muses were seen as mediating inspiration from the gods. Romans and Greeks invoked the concept of an external creative "daemon" (Greek) or "genius" (Latin), linked to the sacred or the divine. However, none of these views are similar to the modern concept of creativity, and the rejection of creativity in favor of discovery and the belief that individual creation was a conduit of the divine would dominate the West until the Renaissance and even later. From this philosophy arose the Renaissance man (or polymath), an individual who embodies the principles of humanism in their ceaseless courtship with knowledge and creation. One of the most well-known and immensely accomplished examples is Leonardo da Vinci.

From the 17th to the 19th centuries

However, the shift from divine inspiration to the abilities of the individual was gradual and would not become immediately apparent until the Age of Enlightenment. By the 18th century, creativity (notably in aesthetics) linked with the concept of imagination became more frequent. In the writing of Thomas Hobbes, imagination became a key element of human cognition. and Henri Poincaré (1908) began to reflect on and publicly discuss their creative processes. The insights of Poincaré and von Helmholtz inspired the accounts of the creative process by pioneering theorists such as Graham Wallas and Max Wertheimer. In his work Art of Thought, published in 1926, Wallas presented one of the first models of the creative process. In the Wallas model, creative insights and illuminations may be explained by a process consisting of five stages:

preparation (preparatory work on a problem that focuses the individual's mind on the problem and explores the problem's dimensions),
incubation (in which the problem is internalized into the unconscious mind although nothing appears externally to be happening),
intimation (the creative person gets a "feeling" that a solution is on its way),
illumination or insight (in which the creative idea bursts forth from its preconscious processing into conscious awareness);
verification (in which the idea is consciously verified, elaborated, and then applied).

Wallas's model is also often treated as four stages, with "intimation" seen as a sub-stage.

Wallas considered creativity to be a legacy of the evolutionary process, which allowed humans to quickly adapt to rapidly changing environments. Simonton provides an updated perspective on this view in his book, Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity.

In 1927, mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead gave the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, later published as Process and Reality. He is credited with having coined the term "creativity" to serve as the ultimate category of his metaphysical scheme.

Although psychometric studies of creativity had been conducted by The London School of Psychology as early as 1927 with the work of H.L. Hargreaves into the Faculty of Imagination. The formal psychometric measurement of creativity, from the standpoint of orthodox psychological literature, is usually considered to have begun with psychologist J.P. Guilford's address to the American Psychological Association in 1950. That address helped to popularize the study of creativity and to focus attention on scientific approaches to conceptualizing creativity. Statistical analyzes led to the recognition of creativity as an aspect of human cognition separate from IQ-type intelligence, under the study of which it had previously been subsumed. Guilford's work suggested that above a threshold level of IQ, the relationship between creativity and classically measured intelligence broke down.

Across cultures

Creativity is viewed differently in different countries. For example, cross-cultural research centered in Hong Kong found that Westerners view creativity more in terms of the individual attributes of a person, such as their aesthetic taste, while Chinese people view creativity more in terms of the social influence of creative people (i.e. what they can contribute to society). Mpofu, et al., surveyed 28 African languages and found that 27 had no word which directly translated to "creativity", with Arabic being the exception. The linguistic relativity hypothesis (i.e. that language can affect thought) suggests that the lack of an equivalent word for "creativity" may affect the views of creativity among speakers of such languages. However, more research would be needed to establish this, and there is certainly no suggestion that this linguistic difference makes people any less—or more—creative. Nevertheless, it is true that there has been very little research on creativity in Africa and Latin America. Creativity has been more thoroughly researched in the northern hemisphere, but there are cultural differences between northern countries. In Scandinavia, creativity is seen as an individual attitude that helps people cope with life's challenges, while in Germany, creativity is seen more as a process that can be applied to help solve problems.

Classification

"Four C" model

Psychologists James Kaufman and Ronald Beghetto introduced a "four C" model of creativity. The four "C's" are:

mini-c ("transformative learning" involving "personally meaningful interpretations of experiences, actions, and insights").
little-c (everyday problem-solving and creative expression).
Pro-C (exhibited by people who are professionally or vocationally creative, though not necessarily eminent).
Big-C (creativity considered great in a given field).

This model was intended to help accommodate models and theories of creativity that stressed competence as an essential component and a historic transformation of a creative domain as the highest mark of creativity. It also, the authors argued, made a useful framework for analyzing creative processes in individuals.

The contrast signified by the terms "Big C" and "little C" has been widely used. Kozbelt, Beghetto, and Runco used a little-c/Big-C model to review major theories of creativity.

Ken Robinson and Anna Craft and cites Robinson as referring to "high" and "democratic" creativity. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defined creativity in terms of individuals judged to have made significant creative and perhaps domain-changing contributions. Simonton analyzed the career trajectories of eminent creative people in order to map patterns and predictors of creative productivity.

"Four P's" aspects

Theories of creativity (and empirical investigations of why some people are more creative than others) have focused on a variety of aspects. The dominant factors are usually identified as "the four P's," a framework first put forward by Mel Rhodes:

;Process:A focus on process is shown in cognitive approaches that try to describe thought mechanisms and techniques for creative thinking. Theories invoking divergent rather than convergent thinking (such as that of Guilford), or those describing the staging of the creative process (such as that of Wallas) are primarily theories of the creative process.

;Product:A focus on a creative product usually attempts to assess creative output, whether for psychometrics (see below) or to understand why some objects are considered creative. It is from a consideration of product that the standard definition of creativity as the production of something both novel and useful arises.

;Person:A focus on the nature of the creative person considers more general intellectual habits, such as openness, levels of ideation, autonomy, expertise, exploratory behavior, and so on.

;Press and place:A focus on place (or press) considers the circumstances in which creativity flourishes, such as degrees of autonomy, access to resources, and the nature of gatekeepers. Creative lifestyles are characterized by nonconforming attitudes and behaviors, as well as flexibility.

"Five A's" aspects

In 2013, based on a sociocultural critique of the Four-P's model as individualistic, static, and decontextualized, psychology professor and author Vlad Petre Glăveanu proposed a "Five A's" model consisting of actor, action, artifact, audience, and affordance. In this model, the actor is the person with attributes but who is also located within social networks; action is the process of creativity not only in internal cognitive terms but also external, bridging the gap between ideation and implementation; artifacts emphasize how creative products typically represent cumulative innovations over time rather than abrupt discontinuities; and "press/place" is divided into audience and affordance, which consider the interdependence of the creative individual with the social and material world, respectively. Although not supplanting the Four P's model in creativity research, the Five A's model has exerted influence over the direction of some creativity research, and has been credited with bringing coherence to studies across a number of creative domains.

Process theories

There has been significant research conducted in the fields of psychology and cognitive science towards better understanding the processes by which creativity occurs. The results of these studies have led to several possible explanations of the sources and methods of creativity. Empirical research has investigated whether, as the concept of "incubation" in Wallas's model implies, a period of interruption or rest from a problem may aid creative problem-solving. Early work proposed that creative solutions to problems arise mysteriously from the unconscious mind while the conscious mind is occupied with other tasks. This hypothesis is included in Csikszentmihalyi's five-phase model of the creative process, which describes incubation as a time when one's unconscious takes over. This was supposed to allow for unique connections to be made without the conscious mind trying to make logical order out of the problem.

Ward listed various hypotheses that have been advanced to explain why incubation may aid creative problem-solving and notes how some empirical evidence is consistent with a different hypothesis: incubation aids creative problems in that it enables "forgetting" of misleading clues. The absence of incubation may lead the problem solver to become fixated on inappropriate problem-solving strategies.

Divergent thinking

J. P. Guilford drew a distinction between convergent and divergent production, or convergent and divergent thinking. Convergent thinking involves aiming for a single, correct, or best solution to a problem (e.g. "How can we get a crewed rocket to land on the moon safely and within budget?"). Divergent thinking, on the other hand, involves the creative generation of multiple answers to an open-ended prompt (e.g. "How can a chair be used?"). However, as Runco pointed out, there is a clear distinction between creative thinking and divergent thinking. Creative thinking focuses on the production, combination, and assessment of ideas to formulate something new and unique, while divergent thinking focuses on conceiving a variety of ideas that are not necessarily new or unique. Other researchers have occasionally used the terms flexible thinking or fluid intelligence, which are also roughly similar to (but not synonymous with) creativity. While convergent and divergent thinking differ greatly in terms of approach to problem solving, it is believed that both are employed to some degree in solving most real-world problems. Some evidence shows that when people use their imagination to develop new ideas, those ideas are structured in predictable ways in accordance with properties of existing categories and concepts. Weisberg argued, in contrast, that creativity involves ordinary cognitive processes yielding extraordinary results.

Explicit–implicit interaction theory

Helie and Sun proposed a framework for understanding creativity in problem solving, namely the explicit–implicit interaction (EII) theory of creativity. This theory attempts to provide a more unified explanation of relevant phenomena (in part by reinterpreting/integrating various fragmentary existing theories of incubation and insight).

The EII theory relies mainly on five basic principles:

co-existence of, and the difference between, explicit and implicit knowledge
simultaneous involvement of implicit and explicit processes in most tasks
redundant representation of explicit and implicit knowledge
integration of the results of explicit and implicit processing
iterative (and possibly bidirectional) processing

A computational implementation of the theory was developed based on the CLARION cognitive architecture and used to simulate relevant human data. This work is an initial step in the development of process-based theories of creativity, encompassing incubation, insight, and various other related phenomena.

Conceptual blending

In The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler introduced the concept of "bisociation" – that creativity arises as a result of the intersection of two quite different frames of reference. In the 1990s, various approaches in cognitive science that dealt with metaphor, analogy, and structure mapping converged, and a new integrative approach to the study of creativity in science, art, and humor emerged under the label conceptual blending.

Honing theory

Honing theory, developed principally by psychologist Liane Gabora, posits that creativity arises due to the self-organizing, self-mending nature of a worldview. The creative process is a way by which the individual hones (and re-hones) an integrated worldview. Honing theory places emphasis not only on the externally visible creative outcome but also on the internal cognitive restructuring and repair of the worldview brought about by the creative process. When one is faced with a creatively demanding task, there is an interaction between one's conception of the task and one's worldview. The conception of the task changes through interaction with the worldview, and the worldview changes through interaction with the task. This interaction is reiterated until the task is complete, at which point the task is conceived of differently and the worldview is subtly or drastically transformed, following the natural tendency of a worldview to attempt to resolve dissonance and seek internal consistency amongst its components, whether they be ideas, attitudes, or bits of knowledge. Dissonance in a person's worldview is, in some cases, generated by viewing their peers' creative outputs, and, so, people pursue their own creative endeavors to restructure their worldviews and reduce dissonance.

A central feature of honing theory is the notion of a "potentiality state". Honing theory posits that creative thought proceeds not by searching through and randomly "mutating" predefined possibilities but by drawing upon associations that exist due to overlap in the distributed neural-cell assemblies that participate in the encoding of experiences in memory. Midway through the creative process, one may have made associations between the current task and previous experiences but not yet disambiguated which aspects of those previous experiences are relevant to the current task. Thus, the creative idea may feel "half-baked". At that point, it can be said to be in a potentiality state, because how it will actualize depends on the different internally or externally generated contexts it interacts with.

Honing theory is held to explain certain phenomena not dealt with by other theories of creativity—for example, how different works by the same creator exhibit a recognizable style or "voice" even in different creative outlets. This is not predicted by theories of creativity that emphasize chance processes or the accumulation of expertise, but it is predicted by honing theory, according to which personal style reflects the creator's uniquely structured worldview. Another example is the environmental stimulus for creativity. Creativity is commonly considered to be fostered by a supportive, nurturing, and trustworthy environment conducive to self-actualization. In line with this idea, Gabora posits that creativity is a product of culture and that our social interactions evolve our culture in way that promotes creativity.

Everyday imaginative thought

In everyday thought, people often spontaneously imagine alternatives to reality when they think "if only...". Their counterfactual thinking is viewed as an example of everyday creative processes. It has been proposed that the creation of counterfactual alternatives to reality depends on cognitive processes that are similar to rational thought.

Imaginative thought in everyday life can be categorized based on whether it involves perceptual or motor-related mental imagery, novel combinatorial processing, or altered psychological states. This classification aids in understanding the neural foundations and practical implications of imagination.

Creative thinking is a central aspect of everyday life, encompassing both controlled and undirected processes. This includes divergent thinking and stage models, highlighting the importance of extra- and meta-cognitive contributions to imaginative thought.

Brain-network dynamics play a crucial role in creative cognition. The default and executive control networks in the brain cooperate during creative tasks, suggesting a complex interaction between these networks in facilitating everyday imaginative thought.

Dialectical theory

The term "dialectical theory of creativity" dates back to psychoanalyst Daniel Dervin and was later developed into an interdisciplinary theory. This theory starts with the ancient concept that creativity takes place in an interplay between order and chaos. Similar ideas can be found in neuroscience and psychology. Neurobiologically, it can be shown that the creative process takes place in a dynamic interplay between coherence and incoherence that leads to new and usable neuronal networks. Psychology shows how the dialectics of convergent and focused thinking with divergent and associative thinking leads to new ideas and products.

Personality traits such as the "Big Five" seem to be the creative process: emotional instability versus stability, extraversion versus introversion, openness versus reserve, agreeableness versus antagonism, and disinhibition versus constraint. The dialectical theory of creativity also applies to counseling and psychotherapy.

Neuroeconomic framework

Lin and Vartanian developed a neurobiological description of creative cognition. This interdisciplinary framework integrates theoretical principles and empirical results from neuroeconomics, reinforcement learning, cognitive neuroscience, and neurotransmission research on the locus coeruleus system. It describes how decision-making processes studied by neuroeconomists as well as activity in the locus coeruleus system underlie creative cognition and the large-scale brain network dynamics associated with creativity. It suggests that creativity is an optimization and utility maximization problem that requires individuals to determine the optimal way to exploit and explore ideas (e.g., the multi-armed bandit problem). This utility-maximization process is thought to be mediated by the locus coeruleus system, and this creativity framework describes how tonic and phasic locus coeruleus activities work in conjunction to facilitate the exploiting and exploring of creative ideas. This framework not only explains previous empirical results but also makes novel and falsifiable predictions at different levels of analysis (ranging from neurobiological to cognitive and personality differences).

Behaviorism theory

B.F. Skinner attributed creativity to accidental behaviors that are reinforced by the environment. In behaviorism, creativity can be understood as novel or unusual behaviors that are reinforced if they produce a desired outcome. Spontaneous behaviors by living creatures are thought to reflect past learned behaviors. In this way, a behaviorist may say that prior learning caused novel behaviors to be reinforced many times over, and the individual has been shaped to produce increasingly novel behaviors. A creative person, according to this definition, is someone who has been reinforced more often for novel behaviors than others. Behaviorists suggest that anyone can be creative, they just need to be reinforced to learn to produce novel behaviors.

Investment theory

The "investment theory of creativity" suggests that many individual and environmental factors must exist in precise ways for extremely high, as opposed to average, levels of creativity to result. In the "investment" sense, a person with their particular characteristics in their particular environment may see an opportunity to devote their time and energy to something that has been overlooked by others. The creative person develops an undervalued or under-recognized idea to the point where it is established as a new and creative idea. Just as in the financial world, some investments are worth the buy-in, while others are less productive and do not generate returns to the extent that the investor expected. This "investment theory of creativity" asserts that creativity might rely to some extent on the right investment of effort being added to a field at the right time in the right way.

Computational creativity

Jürgen Schmidhuber's formal theory of creativity postulates that creativity, curiosity, and interestingness are by-products of a simple computational principle for measuring and optimizing learning progress.

Consider an agent able to manipulate its environment and thus its own sensory inputs. The agent can use a black box optimization method such as reinforcement learning to learn, through informed trial and error, sequences of actions that maximize the expected sum of its future reward signals. There are extrinsic reward signals for achieving externally given goals, such as finding food when hungry. But for Schmidhuber's objective function to be maximized also includes an additional, intrinsic term to model "wow-effects". This non-standard term motivates purely creative behavior of the agent, even when there are no external goals.

A wow-effect is formally defined as follows: as the agent is creating and predicting and encoding the continually growing history of actions and sensory inputs, it keeps improving the predictor or encoder, which can be implemented as an artificial neural network, or some other machine learning device, that can exploit regularities in the data to improve its performance over time. The improvements can be measured precisely, by computing the difference in computational costs (storage size, number of required synapses, errors, time) needed to encode new observations before and after learning. This difference depends on the encoder's present knowledge, which changes over time, but the theory formally takes this into account. The cost difference measures the strength of the present wow-effect due to sudden improvements in data compression or computational speed. It becomes an intrinsic reward signal for the action selector. The objective function thus motivates the action optimizer to create action sequences that cause more wow-effects.

Irregular, random data (or noise) do not permit any wow-effects or learning progress, and thus are "boring" by nature (providing no reward). Already-known and predictable regularities also are boring. Temporarily interesting are only the initially unknown, novel, regular patterns in both actions and observations. This motivates the agent to perform continual, open-ended, active, creative exploration.

Schmidhuber's work is highly influential in intrinsic motivation, which has emerged as a research topic in the study of artificial intelligence and robotics.

According to Schmidhuber, his objective function explains the activities of scientists, artists, and comedians. For example, physicists are motivated to create experiments leading to observations that obey previously unpublished physical laws, permitting better data compression. Likewise, composers receive intrinsic reward for creating non-arbitrary melodies with unexpected but regular harmonies that permit wow-effects through data compression improvements. Similarly, a comedian gets an intrinsic reward for "inventing a novel joke with an unexpected punch line, related to the beginning of the story in an initially unexpected but quickly learnable way that also allows for better compression of the perceived data."

Schmidhuber augured that computer hardware advances would greatly scale up rudimentary artificial scientists and artists. He used the theory to create low-complexity art and an attractive human face.

Personal assessment

Psychometric approaches

History

J. P. Guilford's group,

Additionally, Guilford hypothesized one of the first models that specified the components of creativity. He explained that creativity was a result of having three qualities: the ability to recognize problems, "fluency", and "flexibility". "Fluency" encompassed "ideational fluency", or the ability to rapidly produce a variety of ideas fulfilling stated requirements; "associational fluency", or the ability to generate a list of words associated with a given word; and "expressional fluency", or the ability to organize words into larger units such as phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. "Flexibility" encompassed both "spontaneous flexibility", or the general ability to be flexible, and "adaptive flexibility", or the ability to produces responses that are novel and of high quality.

This represents the base model which several researchers would alter to produce their own new theories of creativity years later. and criticized. One example is the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking developed in 1966. Computer programs were able to achieve a correlation to human graders of 0.60 and 0.72.

Semantic networks also devise originality scores that yield significant correlations with socio-personal measures. A team of researchers led by James C. Kaufman and Mark A. Runco combined expertise in creativity research, natural language processing, computational linguistics, and statistical data analysis to devise a scalable system for computerized automated testing: the SparcIt Creativity Index Testing system. This system enabled automated scoring of DT tests that is reliable, objective, and scalable, thus addressing most of the issues of DT tests that had been found and reported.

Researchers have taken a social-personality approach by using personality traits such as independence of judgement, self-confidence, attraction to complexity, aesthetic orientation, and risk-taking as measures of personal creativity. Openness to experience is consistently related to a host of different assessments of creativity. Investigation of the other Big Five traits has demonstrated subtle differences between different domains of creativity. Compared to non-artists, artists tend to have higher levels of openness to experience and lower levels of conscientiousness, while scientists are more open to experience, conscientious, and higher in the confidence-dominance facets of extraversion compared to non-scientists.

Self-reporting questionnaires

Biographical methods use quantitative characteristics, such as the number of publications, patents, or artistic performances that can be credited to a person. While this method was originally developed for highly creative personalities, today it is also available as self-report questionnaires supplemented with frequent, less outstanding creative behaviors such as writing a short story or creating recipes. The self-report questionnaire most frequently used in research is the Creative Achievement Questionnaire, a self-report test that measures creative achievement across ten domains, which was described in 2005 and shown to be reliable when compared to other measures of creativity and to independent evaluations of creative output.

Factors

Intelligence

The potential relationship between creativity and intelligence has been of interest since the last half of the twentieth century, when many influential studies extensively studied both. This joint focus highlighted both the theoretical and practical importance of the relationship: researchers were interested in not only if the two qualities were related, but also how and why.

There are multiple theories accounting for their relationship, with there being three main theories. Threshold theory states that intelligence is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for creativity, and that there is a moderate positive relationship between creativity and intelligence until IQ ~120. Certification theory states that creativity is not intrinsically related to intelligence. Instead, individuals are required to meet the requisite level of intelligence in order to gain a certain level of education or work, which in turn offers the opportunity to be creative. In this theory, displays of creativity are moderated by intelligence. Interference theory states, in contrast, that extremely high intelligence might interfere with creative ability.

Sternberg and O'Hara proposed a different framework of five possible relationships between creativity and intelligence: that creativity was a subset of intelligence; that intelligence was a subset of creativity; that the two constructs overlapped; that they were both part of the same construct (coincident sets); or that they were distinct constructs (disjoint sets).

Creativity as a subset of intelligence

A number of researchers include creativity, either explicitly or implicitly, as a key component of intelligence, for example:

Sternberg's Theory of Successful Intelligence includes creativity as a main component and comprises three sub-theories: contextual (analytic), contextual (practical), and experiential (creative). Experiential sub-theory—the ability to use pre-existing knowledge and skills to solve new and novel problems—is directly related to creativity.
The Cattell–Horn–Carroll theory (CHC) includes creativity as a subset of intelligence, associated with the broad group factor of long-term storage and retrieval (Glr). Glr narrows abilities relating to creativity include ideational fluency, associational fluency, and originality/creativity. Silvia et al. conducted a study to look at the relationship between divergent thinking and verbal fluency tests and reported that both fluency and originality in divergent thinking were significantly affected by the broad-level Glr factor. Martindale extended the CHC-theory by proposing that people who are creative are also selective in their processing speed. Martindale argues that in the creative process, larger amounts of information are processed more slowly in the early stages, and as a person begins to understand the problem, the processing speed is increased.
The Dual Process Theory of Intelligence posits a two-factor or type model of intelligence. Type 1 is a conscious process and concerns goal-directed thoughts. Type 2 is an unconscious process, and concerns spontaneous cognition, which encompasses daydreaming and implicit learning ability. Kaufman argues that creativity occurs as a result of Type 1 and Type 2 processes working together in combination. Each type in the creative process can be used to varying degrees.

Intelligence as a subset of creativity

In this relationship model, intelligence is a key component in the development of creativity, for example:

Sternberg & Lubart's Investment Theory, using the metaphor of a stock market, demonstrates that creative thinkers are like good investors—they buy low and sell high (in their ideas). Like undervalued or low-valued stock, creative individuals generate unique ideas that are initially rejected by other people. The creative individual has to persevere and convince others of the idea's value. After convincing others, and thus increasing the idea's value, the creative individual "sells high" by leaving the idea with the other people and moving on to generate another idea. According to this theory, six distinct, but related elements contribute to successful creativity: intelligence, knowledge, thinking styles, personality, motivation, and environment. Intelligence is just one of the six factors that can, either solely or in conjunction with the other five factors, generate creative thoughts.
Amabile's Componential Model of Creativity posits three within-individual components needed for creativity—domain-relevant skills, creativity-relevant processes, and task motivation—and one component external to the individual—their surrounding social environment. Creativity requires the confluence of all components. High creativity will result when a person is intrinsically motivated, possesses both a high level of domain-relevant skills and has high skills in creative thinking, and is working in a highly creative environment.
The Amusement Park Theoretical Model is a four-step theory in which domain-specific and generalist views are integrated into a model of creativity. The researchers make use of the metaphor of the amusement park to demonstrate that, within each of the following creative levels, intelligence plays a key role:
To get into the amusement park, there are initial requirements (e.g., time and transportation needed to go to the park). Initial requirements (such as intelligence) are necessary, but not sufficient for creativity. They are more like prerequisites for creativity, and if a person does not possess the basic level of the initial requirement (intelligence), then they will not be able to generate creative thoughts and behaviour.
Secondly, there are the subcomponents—general thematic areas—that increase in specificity. Like choosing which type of amusement park to visit (e.g., a zoo or a water park), these areas relate to the areas in which someone could be creative (e.g., poetry).
Thirdly, there are specific domains. After choosing the type of park to visit (e.g., if one chooses a waterpark, that person has to choose which specific park to go to). For example, within the poetry domain there are many different forms (e.g., free verse, riddles, sonnets, etc.).
Lastly, there are micro-domains. These are the specific tasks that reside within each domain (e.g., individual rides at the waterpark equate to individual lines in a poem in free-verse).

Creativity and intelligence as overlapping yet distinct constructs

These concepts posit creativity and intelligence as distinct, but intersecting constructs, for example:

In Renzulli's Three-Ring Conception of Giftedness, giftedness is an overlap of above-average intellectual ability, creativity, and task commitment. Under this view, creativity and intelligence are distinct constructs, but they overlap under the correct conditions.
In the PASS theory of intelligence, the planning component—the ability to solve problems, make decisions, and take action—strongly overlaps with the concept of creativity.
Threshold Theory (TT) derives from a number of previous research findings that suggested that a threshold exists in the relationship between creativity and intelligence—both constructs are moderately positively correlated up to an IQ of ~120. Above this threshold, if there is a relationship at all, it is small and weak. TT posits that a moderate level of intelligence is necessary for creativity.

Creativity and intelligence as coincident sets

Under this view, researchers posit that there are no differences in the mechanisms underlying creativity from those used in normal problem solving, and in normal problem solving there is no need for creativity. Thus, creativity and intelligence (problem solving) are the same thing. Perkins referred to this as the "nothing-special" view.

Creativity and intelligence as disjoint sets

In this view, creativity and intelligence are completely different, unrelated constructs. Along with the coincident set view, this is quite a rare position taken within the literature.

Affective influence

Some theories suggest that creativity may be particularly susceptible to affective influence. The term "affect" in this context refers to liking or disliking key aspects of the subject in question. This work largely follows from findings in psychology regarding the ways in which affective states are involved in human judgment and decision-making.

According to Alice Isen, positive affect has three primary effects on cognitive activity. First, it makes additional cognitive material available for processing, increasing the number of cognitive elements available for association. Second, it leads to defocused attention and a more complex cognitive context, increasing the breadth of those elements that are treated as relevant to the problem. Third, it increases cognitive flexibility, increasing the probability that diverse cognitive elements will in fact become associated. Together, these processes enable creativity.

Barbara Fredrickson, in her broaden-and-build model, suggests that positive emotions, such as joy and love, broaden a person's available repertoire of cognitions and actions, thus enhancing creativity.

According to these researchers, positive emotions increase the number of cognitive elements available for association (attention scope) and the number of elements that are relevant to the problem (cognitive scope). Day-by-day psychological experiences—including emotions, perceptions, and motivation—significantly impact creative performance. Creativity is higher when emotions and perceptions are more positive and when intrinsic motivation is stronger.

Some meta-analyses, such as Baas, et al., (2008) analyzing 66 studies of creativity and affect, support the link between creativity and positive affect.

Mental health

Links have been identified between creativity and mood disorders, particularly manic-depressive disorder (a.k.a. bipolar disorder) and depressive disorder (a.k.a. unipolar disorder). However, different artists have described mental illness as having both positive and negative effects on their work.

Studies

A study by psychologist J. Philippe Rushton found creativity to correlate with intelligence and psychoticism. Another study found creativity to be greater in people with schizotypal personality disorder than in people with either schizophrenia or those without mental health disorders. While divergent thinking was associated with activation of both sides of the prefrontal cortex, schizotypal individuals were found to have much greater activation of their right prefrontal cortex. That study hypothesized that such individuals are better at accessing both hemispheres, allowing them to make novel associations at a faster rate. Consistent with this hypothesis, ambidexterity is also more common in people with schizotypal personality disorder and schizophrenia. Three studies by Mark Batey and Adrian Furnham demonstrated the relationships between schizotypal personality disorder, hypomanic personality, and several different measures of creativity.

A study of 300,000 persons with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or unipolar depression, and their relatives, found overrepresentation in creative professions of those with bipolar disorder as well as for undiagnosed siblings of those with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. There was no association for those with unipolar depression or their relatives.

Another study, involving more than one million people, conducted by Swedish researchers at the Karolinska Institute, reported a number of correlations between creative occupations and mental illnesses. Writers had a higher risk of anxiety and bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, unipolar depression, and substance abuse, and were almost twice as likely as the general population to kill themselves. Dancers and photographers were also more likely to have bipolar disorder. Those in the creative professions were no more likely to have psychiatric disorders than other people, although they were more likely to have a close relative with a disorder, including anorexia and, to some extent, autism, the Journal of Psychiatric Research reported. When she performed follow-up studies over a 15-year period, she found that 43% of the authors had bipolar disorder, compared to 1% of the general public.

In 1989 another study, by Kay Redfield Jamison, reaffirmed those statistics, with 38% of her sample of authors having a history of mood disorders. Anthony Storr, a prominent psychiatrist, remarked: