Conceptualizing the Human Affective Experience via Creativity

Abstract

Creativity drives innovation, not only for a society at large, but also in the individual. This framing, known as mini-c creativity, is concerned with intraindividual psychological processes that help us navigate the variable circumstances in our lives and derive learnable meaning from them. However, while mini-c creativity has been investigated from the lens of developmental and learning psychology, affective psychology also utilizes mini-c operations by way of regulating emotions that emerge across everyday stressors. Joining creativity with emotion psychology can ultimately afford researchers and clinicians a new host of toolkits and intervention targets by which to treat disorders related to emotion regulation (ER). My dissertation provides three separate but complementary pathways through which individual creativity and ER interact within-person. First, I show the regulatory benefits and physiological correlates of engaging in creative production (painting), and localize its effect to the cognitive creative operations involved during art-making. Then, I examine how features of creativity characterize one strategy of ER––reappraisal––during its reinterpretation of negative events. Across samples and contexts, originality and effectiveness ratings of generated reappraisals demonstrated a negative quadratic relationship, akin to other types of creativity. Lastly, I frame ER at large, across strategies, as a creative (divergent-thinking) process by modeling the diversity and fluency with which individuals generate ideas for regulation. Regression and hurdle models revealed that more-creative individuals held richer regulatory repertoires whereas more-depressed individuals showed reduced flexibility during idea generation. Together, these studies provide a multi-level integration of ER and creativity psychology, with deep implications for not only mental health but also our evolving appreciation for creativity amidst novel generative technologies.