Introducing creativity techniques and software apps to the care of people with dementia

This poster reports research to introduce creative problem solving techniques and software to the care for people with dementia in residential homes

Suspicious Spirits, Flexible Minds: When Distrust Enhances Creativity

Considering that distrust is a core element of human interaction, it has received surprisingly little scientific attention. This research contributes to filling this gap by investigating distrust’s influence on creativity. Intuitively as well as in light of prior research, distrust and creativity appear incompatible. The social consequences of distrust include reluctance to share information, a quality detrimental to creativity in social settings. At the same time, the cognitive concomitants of distrust bear resemblance to creative cognition: Distrust seems to foster thinking about non-obvious alternatives to potentially deceptive appearances. This tendency resembles cognitive flexibility, which is conducive to creativity. These cognitive underpinnings of distrust hold the provocative implication that distrust may foster creativity. Mirroring these contradictory findings, I suggest that the social vs. cognitive consequences of distrust have diverging implications for creativity. I address this question in Study 1 by introducing private/public as a moderating variable for effects of distrust on creativity. Consistent with distrust’s social consequences, subliminal distrust (vs. trust) priming had detrimental effects on creative generation presumed to be public. Consistent with distrust’s cognitive consequences, though, the opposite emerged in private. Study 2 replicated a beneficial effect of distrust on private creative generation with a different priming method. Studies 3 and 4 showed increased category inclusiveness vs. increased remote semantic spread after distrust priming. The latter findings are consistent with enhanced cognitive flexibility as a consequence of distrust. Taken together, these results provide evidence for the creativity-enhancing potential of distrust and suggest cognitive flexibility as the process in question

Motor expressions as creativity support: Exploring the potential for physical interaction

This research explores the effects of physical interactions designed on the basis of motor expressions to support creative ideation in creativity support technologies. The presented research looks into the effects on creative ideation of incompatibility between motor expressions and problem situations, and appraisals of (un)pleasantness. We report the results of a preliminary study which suggests that affective incompatibility between a problem situation and a motor expression benefits creative ideation, and that pleasantness motor expressions enhance task enjoyment, which in turn leads to a beneficial effect on the originality of ideas generated. Based on these results, we conclude with two new directions for the design of physical interactions with novel creativity support technologies

Paradigms in the study of creativity: introducing the perspective of cultural psychology

This article identifies three paradigms in creativity theory and research in psychology. The He-paradigm, focused on the solitary genius, has been followed, mainly after the 1950s, by the I-paradigm, equally individualistic in nature but attributing creativity to each and every individual. Extending this view, the We-paradigm incorporates what became known as the social psychology of creativity. The cultural psychology of creativity builds upon this last theoretical approach while being critical of some of its assumptions. This relatively new perspective, using the conceptual and methodological framework of cultural psychology, investigates the sociocultural roots and dynamics of all our creative acts and employs a tetradic framework of self – community – new artifact – existing artifacts in its conceptualization of creativity. The theoretical basis of the cultural psychology approach is analyzed as well as some of its main implications for both the understanding and study of creativity