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Cognitive and Affective Aspects of Creative Option Generation in Everyday Life Situations.

ABSTRACT: Which factors influence a human being's ability to develop new perspectives and be creative? This ability is pivotal for any context in which new cognitions are required, such as innovative endeavors in science and art, or psychotherapeutic settings. In this article, we seek to bring together two research programs investigating the generation of creative options: On the one hand, research on option generation in the decision-making literature and, on the other hand, cognitive and clinical creativity research. Previous decision-making research has largely neglected the topic of generating creative options. Experiments typically provided participants with a clear set of options to choose from, but everyday life situations are less structured and allow countless ways to react. Before choosing an option, agents have to self-generate a set of options to choose from. Such option generation processes have only recently moved to the center of attention. The present study examines the creative quality of self-generated options in daily life situations. A student sample (N = 48) generated options for action in 70 briefly described everyday life scenarios. We rated the quality of the options on three dimensions of creativity- originality, feasibility, and divergence -and linked these qualities to option generation fluency (speed and number of generated options), situational features like the familiarity and the affective valence of the situation in which the options were generated, and trait measures of cognitive performance. We found that when situations were familiar to the participant, greater negative affective valence of the situation was associated with more originality and divergence of generated options. We also found that a higher option generation fluency was associated with a greater maximal originality of options. We complete our article with a joint research agenda for researchers in the decision-making field focusing on option generation and, on the other hand, researchers working on the cognitive and clinical aspects of creativity.

SUBMITTER: Schweizer TS

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4971016 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Cognitive and Affective Aspects of Creative Option Generation in Everyday Life Situations.

Schweizer T Sophie TS Schmalenberger Katja M KM Eisenlohr-Moul Tory A TA Mojzisch Andreas A Kaiser Stefan S Funke Joachim J

Frontiers in psychology 20160803

Which factors influence a human being's ability to develop new perspectives and be creative? This ability is pivotal for any context in which new cognitions are required, such as innovative endeavors in science and art, or psychotherapeutic settings. In this article, we seek to bring together two research programs investigating the generation of creative options: On the one hand, research on option generation in the decision-making literature and, on the other hand, cognitive and clinical creati ...[more]

PMID: 27536258

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Project description:Given the need for knowledge on the restorative potential of urban settings, we sought to estimate the effects of personal and contextual factors on preferences and restoration likelihood assessments for different urban activities-in-environments. We also sought to study the generality of these effects across different countries.We conducted a true experiment with convenience samples of university students in the Netherlands (n = 80), Sweden (n = 100), and the USA (n = 316). In each country, the experiment had a mixed design with activities-in-environments (sitting in a park, sitting in a cafe, walking in a shopping mall, walking along a busy street) manipulated within-subjects and the need for restoration (attentional fatigue, no attentional fatigue) and immediate social context (in company, alone) manipulated between-subjects. The manipulations relied on previously tested scenarios describing everyday situations that participants were instructed to remember and imagine themselves being in. For each imagined situation (activity-in-environment with antecedent fatigue condition and immediate social context), subjects provided two criterion measures: general preference and the likelihood of achieving psychological restoration.The settings received different preference and restoration likelihood ratings as expected, affirming that a busy street, often used in comparisons with natural settings, is not representative of the restorative potential of urban settings. Being with a close friend and attentional fatigue both moderated ratings for specific settings. Findings of additional moderation by country of residence caution against broad generalizations regarding preferences for and the expected restorative effects of different urban settings.Preferences and restoration likelihood ratings for urban activity-environment combinations are subject to multiple personal and contextual determinants, including level of attentional fatigue, being alone versus in company, and broader aspects of the urban context that vary across cities and countries. Claims regarding a lack of restorative quality in urban environments are problematic.

Dataset Information

Cognitive and Affective Aspects of Creative Option Generation in Everyday Life Situations.

Publications

Cognitive and Affective Aspects of Creative Option Generation in Everyday Life Situations.

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