Effects of intellectual variables, age, and gender on divergent thinking in adulthood

Abstract

Divergent thinking was assessed in 400 adult women and men with tests of word association (associational uency) and alternate uses (production uency, exibility, and originality). The participants were from four age cohorts: young (17–22 years old), middle-aged (40–50), young-old (60–70), and old-old (75‡). The test battery also included two intellectual ‘‘process’ ’ variables (inductive reasoning, memory span), one ‘‘dynamic resource variable’ ’ (intellectual speediness), one ‘‘structural resource variable’ ’ (vocabulary), and two moderator variables (depression, education). Hierarchical multiple regression analyses showed that divergent thinking was signi cantly, linearly, positively, and moderately related to all of these variables except depression, which was not signi cantly related to divergent thinking. Effects of age group and gender were assessed in analyses of variance (alpha ˆ.01). The age groups did not differ signi cantly in associational uency, but the middle-aged group was the best on production uency, exibility, and originality. Gender had a signi cant effect on only one variable: Women had higher depression scores than men. The study reported in this paper dealt with divergent thinking. In Guilford’s (1967) theory of intelligence, ‘‘divergent’’ thinking is contrasted with ‘‘convergent’ ’ thinking in th