Creative days: A daily diary study of emotion, personality, and everyday creativity.

Abstract

Each day presents an opportunity to engage in small acts of creativity. The present study aimed to understand the ecology of everyday creativity: how certain emotions may help or hinder creative pursuits and who behaves more creatively on a daily basis. We recruited a large sample of 658 young adults (17 to 25 year old; M = 19.8 years) who rated their creativity and their experience of eighteen positive and negative emotion states each day for 13 days using an Internet daily diary method. High activation positive emotions like feeling excited, energetic, and enthusiastic were the most favourable to everyday creativity. Young adults higher in these states reported the most creativity overall, and, on days when people experienced these states, creativity was higher than normal. Medium and low activation positive emotion states like happiness and relaxation were also beneficial to creativity, although not as strongly. Negative emotion states were unrelated to, or antagonistic with creativity. People higher in openness reported the most creativity, which was more strongly yoked to their emotions: They were more creative on emotionally positive days and less creative on emotionally negative days. These findings suggest that creative days are characterised by greater emotional zest and engagement, that open people are creative people, and that personality modulates the emotioncreativity link. Fostering feelings of engagement, zest, and greater openness to new experiences may be the keys to everyday creativity.

Commentary: The Development of Creativity-Ability, Motivation, and Potential

“…And finally, a focus on creativity, instead of creative potential, includes a wider range of interesting outcomes, not merely public, observable creative accomplishments. Researchers interested in everyday creativity and mundane creative acts—the sorts of “little c” creative things people do in everyday life, such as dabbling with musical instruments, scrapbooking, fiddling around with recipes, or making cat memes—point out how much we miss when we emphasize genius, eminence, and achievement (Conner & Silvia, ; Kaufman & Beghetto, ; Silvia et al., ). Focusing on fame, achievement, and accomplishment is perhaps an American thing, but most of the creativity that happens—and perhaps the acts that say the most about people's basic creative natures (Richards, , )—are the more humble daily acts of the silent creative majority.…”

Openness to Experience Enhances Creativity: The Mediating Role of Intrinsic Motivation and the Creative Process Engagement

“…Personality is a relatively stable set of cognitive and behavioral characteristics that influence individual reaction and performance across situations. Among the personality traits in the Five-Factor Model, openness to experience has been consistently found to positively associate with creativity (Conner & Silvia, 2015;Feist, 1998;Ivcevic & Brackett, 2015;van Tilburg, Sedikides, & Wildschut, 2015).…”

Untitled

“…Parte de los estudios evalúan la relación entre el funcionamiento emocional de las personas y diferentes estresores diarios como, por ejemplo, interacciones sociales y familiares negativas o eventos financieros negativos (Bolger, DeLongis, Kessler y Schilling, 1989;Genet y Siemer, 2012;Hankin, Fraley y Abela, 2005;Laurenceau y Bolger, 2005;Sturgeon, Zautra y Okun, 2014). La creatividad y las emociones (Conner y Silvia, 2015) son otro ejemplo de estudios de diario. Otras publicaciones se centran en la relación entre género, como objeto principal de estudio, y emociones diarias (Aubé, 2008;Curran, McDaniel, Pollitt y Totenhagen, 2015;Witt y Wood, 2010) …”