Continual association as a function of level of creativity and type of verbal stimulus.

Abstract

Continual word association was studied as a function of Remote Associates Test (RAT) performance, form class, associative hierarchy, and Thorndike-Lorge word frequency. Ss were selected as high creative (HC), low creative (LC), and medium creative (MC) on the basis of their RAT scores. It was found that HC Ss give the greatest number of associations and maintain a relatively higher speed of association throughout a 2-min. period. More responses were elicited by nouns than adjectives, flat hierarchy words than steep, and high frequency words than low. The S and stimulus variable did not interact. Relevance to an associative theory of creative thinking is discussed.

Associative productivity as a function of creativity level and type of verbal stimulus

“…Comparison of commonness scores of the first association alone revealed no significant differences between groups for either concrete or abstract stimuli. DISCUSSION The present results confirm Mednick, Mednick, & Jung's (1964) fmding that the more creative individual shows a greater associative productivity than does the less creative person. The hypothesis that abstract words enhance the difference between creativity groups in the slope of the response gradient over time was not confirmed.…”

“…The failure to find a significant interaction between creativity group and concrete or abstract stimuli is consistent with Mednick, Mednick, & Jung's (1964) report of nonsignificant interactions between creativity level and type of word (noun-adjective, frequency, associative hierarchy), and also with the results of a previous study by Mandler & Parnes (1957). Mednick's (I962) prediction that the associative behavior of the high creative person would be less stereotyped was not confirmed.…”

“…On the assumption that ability to generate a large number of associations increases the probability of producing a creative solution, Mednick, Mednick, & Jung (1964) predicted that creative individuals would give a larger quantity of associations to a stimulus than would less creative persons. Their Ss associated continuously for 2-rnin periods to each of a variety of stimulus words.…”

Creativeness: Its Meaning and Measurement

“…Kays had 28 graduate students distribute 58 news passages along a continuum from most to least creative. An assessment was made on creative aptitudes with the Remote Associates Test (Mednick, 1962;Mednick, Mednick and Jung, 1964). By means of these Remote Associates Test (RAT) scores Kays was .…”

Response availability, sex, academic ability, and academic achievement within a college population

“…Investigations of sex differences in m indicate that college females give more written responses than males (Matthews, 1965), but no sex differences obtain with 4th, 6th, and 8th grade children (Shapiro, 1964). While creativity (Mednick, Mednick, & Jung, 1964) and normality (Lester, 1960) are reported to be positively related to m, subject anxiety appears to be equivocal in its main effect on m (Davids & Erikson, 1955;Johnson & Lim, 1964), although anxiety and grarnmatical class yield signiflcant interaction effects (Johnson & Lim, 1964 Laffal (1955) suggest that stimulus qualities, rather than subject variables, are the more forceful determinants of associative responses. Table 2.…”