Does a prevention focus evoke a persistent style when performing a creative task?

Abstract

Literature in the field of regulatory focus theory argues that individuals who are promotion-focused in creativity-related tasks are more successful than those who are prevention-focused. However, recent studies have shown that prevention-focused individuals are persistent when solving tasks, potentially leading to improved task performance. This study, which considered two kinds of regulatory focus (chronic/situational), investigated the hypothesis that prevention-focused individuals employ a persistent style when performing creative tasks. A Japanese version of the Remote Associates Test (RAT) was used as a creative task, and subjective depletion after the RAT, as well as the time spent deciding to skip RAT items, were measured as indicators of persistence. The results showed that both chronic and situational prevention focuses made participants more depleted than did the promotion focus. Furthermore, in the situational promotion-focus condition, chronic prevention focus made participants more depleted and lengthened the time taken to skip items. Thus, chronic prevention focus promoted persistence in a regulatory nonfit condition (i.e., situational promotion focus).

Can Regulatory Fit Improve Elementary School Students’ Performance? Effects of Different Types of Regulatory Fit

“…Therefore, people those who experience regulatory fit engage more strongly in their goal pursuit, which leads to better performance (e.g., Förster et al, 1998; Markman et al, 2005; Shah et al, 1998, and others). The effect of regulatory fit has been confirmed in many different fields, such as value (Avnet & Higgins, 2006), creativity (Nagaya & Nakayachi, 2017), persuasion (Cesario et al, 2004), and task performance (Förster et al, 1998; Shah et al, 1998).…”

Why and Under What Conditions Does Loss Aversion Emerge?1

“…These persuasion-related framing effects are called goal-framing effects (Levin, Schneider, & Gaeth, 1998). Studies on goal-framing effects have generally shown that negative framing is more persuasive than positive framing in various domains, such as disease control, infectiousdisease prevention (Block & Keller, 1995), and disaster prevention (Nagaya & Nakayachi, 2019). These framing effect studies suggest that people attach greater weight to negative consequences and monetary losses.…”

“…In the context of goal‐framing effects, the impact on attitude change and the formation of behavioral intentions may also depend on the magnitude of the loss. In previous studies, negative‐framing messages are effective for life‐threatening issues, such as fatal disease prevention and disaster prevention (Krishnamurthy, Carter, & Blair, 2001; Nagaya & Nakayachi, 2019). However, the effectiveness of negative framing has not yet been confirmed for low‐threat illnesses, such as skin cancer.…”

A Systematic Review of Creativity-Related Studies Applying the Remote Associates Test From 2000 to 2019

“…Nine studies analyzed the association between individuals' RAT performance and certain abilities and traits, including blink counts (Chermahini and Hommel, 2010;Ueda et al, 2016), humor , work performance (Op den Kamp et al, 2018), perception (Zmigrod and Zmigrod, 2016), mental health (LeBoutillier and Barry, 2018), adventurism (Shen et al, 2018), and self-evaluation (Harkins, 2006;Nagaya and Nakayachi, 2017). These studies revealed the correlation between creativity and other variables, which indirectly shows the impact of creativity on individuals' performance.…”