Artificial intelligence (AI) systems capable of generating creative outputs are reshaping our understanding of creativity. This shift presents an opportunity for creativity researchers to reevaluate the key components of the creative process. In particular, the advanced capabilities of AI underscore the importance of studying the internal…

Theater is considered one of the creative arts, and participation has long been tied to such disparate outcomes as creative thinking, empathy, and emotional understanding. Yet research on what actually happens in a theater classroom from a psychological perspective has been lacking. In particular, how thinking strategies beyond improvisation, used…

More and more research is showing how different environments can lead to greater or lower creative skills. The purpose of this concept paper is to introduce a novel application of the optimal-level of arousal model that could address inconsistencies present in the literature. After introducing possible definitions of creativity, I discuss the…

This paper considers the inclusion of creative thinking as an innovative domain within the OECD's PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) and offers a series of reflections on the opportunities and limitations that follow from this. Although this recognition of the importance of creative thinking represents a step forward, the current…

We performed an inductive study to advance theory on how a crisis can inspire individuals to be persistently creative in successive cycles. We draw from rich data of 17 volunteer projects in the Tech4Covid movement, a Portuguese organization of entrepreneurs who gathered online to develop digital solutions to help society during the COVID-19…

Although people attempt many creative problem solutions, in general, most creative problem-solving efforts, at least real-world efforts, fail. In the present effort, we examine the reasons creative problem-solving efforts typically fail. We argue that creative problem-solving efforts fail, in part, due to the fundamental nature of the kinds of…

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) introduced creative thinking as an innovative domain in 2022. This paper examines the unique methodological issues in international assessments and the implications of measuring creative thinking within PISA's framework, including stratified sampling, rotated form designs, and a distinct…

The present paper questions the content validity of the eight creativity-related self-report scales available in PISA 2022's context questionnaire and provides a set of considerations for researchers interested in using these indexes. Specifically, we point out some threats to the content validity of these scales (e.g., "creative thinking…

Creative activities are typically thought to be positively associated with creative ability, whether because more creative individuals select into creative activities, or because those activities support the development of creativity, or both. However, the PISA 2022 creative thinking report revealed an unexpected finding: Creative ability was…

I argue that any attempt to define creative ideas cannot fully succeed without also defining uncreative ideas. This argument begins by defining three parameters that characterize a potentially creative thought: the idea's initial probability (p), the final utility (u), and the creator's prior knowledge of that utility (v). The three parameters…

Creativity tests, like creativity itself, vary widely in their structure and use. These differences include instructions, test duration, environments, prompt and response modalities, and the structure of test items. A key factor is task structure, referring to the specificity of the number of responses requested for a given prompt. Classic…

Accounts of the creative process tend to be retrospective and implicitly ground the creative act within the person, the mind, the moment, the idea; in doing so, they often miss the larger sociomaterial qualities that can provide us with important insights about the social relationality and playfulness of the creative process. In this article, we…

The Remote Associates Test (RAT; Mednick, 1962; Mednick & Mednick, 1967) is a commonly employed test of creative convergent thinking. The RAT is scored with a dichotomous scoring, scoring correct answers as 1 and all other answers as 0. Based on recent research into the information processing underlying RAT performance, we argued that the…

For more than one hundred years, students of creativity, including seminal efforts published in the "Journal of Creative Behavior," have sought to identify the key processes people must execute to produce creative problem solutions. In recent years, we have seen a consensual model of key creative thinking processes being accepted by the…

While the scientific investigation into creativity is a recent phenomenon, creative thinking has always been a crucial feature of humanity. The ability to creatively solve problems enabled early humans to survive and laid the foundation for the creative imagination that has resulted in our modern society. While most humans no longer face physical…