Daily Thoughts and Emotions Are Linked to Creativity

What is it about?

In this study, we measured people's thoughts and emotions in daily life for one week by using a smartphone app to administer surveys outside of the lab. We measured creativity both in the lab using traditional creativity tests, as well as in daily life using the app. Overall, we found that creativity was generally associated with a range of positive experiences in daily life, such as having pleasant thoughts, feeling happy, and enjoying one's activities.

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Photo by Frankie Cordoba on Unsplash

Photo by Frankie Cordoba on Unsplash

Why is it important?

We introduced a new measure of real-world creativity, capturing the tendency to think about creative projects, as little is known about naturally-occurring creative thinking, due in part to challenges in measuring creative cognition in naturalistic environments. Further, our new measure reflects the frequency of real-world creative thinking, rather than creative thinking ability, providing better comparison with common frequency-based measures of creative behavior. The results of this study extend previous work and provide new evidence on relationships between creativity and emotion in daily life. Altogether, this study adds to the growing literature on creativity, emotion, and well-being by clarifying the everyday experiences associated with being creative.