Abstract
This chapter presents an overview of the new scenarios opening up for creativity research. The recent research trends develop mainly in three directions: neuroscience, management, and education. The major innovations seem to emerge in the field of education. Digital technologies increasingly stimulate the interest of educators, offering extraordinary means of creating and experimenting with innovative forms of teaching-learning. Changes in creativity research are presented, and some of the new research areas and future trends are highlighted.
TopIntroduction
In 1991, according to a literature review, creativity was considered a relatively neglected topic in psychological/educational research and theory in Western Europe (Urban, 1991). There were no scientific creativity schools or research centers while the personal interest of researchers moved investigations, and literature was scattered in various disciplinary national and international journals. In that period, it also emerged the research interest in creativity in everyday settings as well as in business and management. At the same time, different approaches were developed to foster and train creativity.
Nevertheless, it was prevalent the scientific to philosophical approach of the 1960s. Research was very far from La poétique de la rêverie by Gaston Bachelard, the French philosopher of science who argued the idea of the cosmic imagination (imagination cosmique), proposing the phenomenology of the creative imagination (phénoménologie de l'imagination créatrice). Bachelard claimed that:
À l'image poétique convient ce que Frédéric Schlegel disait du langage: c'est « une création d'un seul jet ». [In the poetic image lies that which Frédéric Schlegel said of language: it is ‘a one-shot creation’] (Bachelard, 1966, p. 14).
Accordingly, the author criticized the experimental psychology:
Les techniques de la psychologie expérimentale ne peuvent guère envisager une étude de l'imagination considérée en ses valeurs créatrices. [The techniques of experimental psychology can hardly envisage a study of the imagination considered on its creative values] (Bachelard, 1966, p. 110).
In the 1960s, as a criticism of the then-current narrow scientific thought, argumentations and statements that were not even wrong flourished in philosophical and psychological investigations on creativity.
From the 1990s to the 2010s, research efforts on creativity focused on four main categories: cognitive, differential, developmental, and social psychological (Simonton, 2012). These categories still represent important research strands. In the last decades, two other categories increasingly attracted the research interest in creativity. They are the creativity in management and education. Creativity in the arts is a particular case.
TopCognitive Psychology Of Creativity
Cognitive Psychology of Creativity focuses on where new ideas come from and what mental processes are responsible to producing them (Boden, 2001). Researchers in this field agree that creativity is not a special faculty of a restrict elite. For them, creativity is based on people general intelligence.
Margaret A. Boden distinguished three types of creative thinking: combinatorial, exploratory, and transformational. Combinatorial creativity involves the generation of unfamiliar (and interesting) juxtapositions of familiar ideas while exploratory and transformational creativity are grounded in some previously existing, culturally accepted, structured style of thinking (Boden, 1998). However:
Saying that there are three types of creativity does not mean that every creative idea or artifact results from only one of them. It may involve all three.
[…] The tripartite division of creativity is intended for analytical purposes. In real life, more than one of those processes may be involved in the generation of what is normally regarded as “one” creative product. Rather than asking whether a theory or artwork as such is creative, yes or no, it is thus ordinarily more sensible to ask whether this or that aspect of a new theory or artwork is creative, and in just what way it is creative. (Boden, 2009, p. 237)
Sustaining that ordinary people employ the same creative thinking processes as the great ones, Cognitive Psychology of Creativity argues that creativity must be studied as a positive psychological trait shared by all human beings.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Not Even Wrong: It is an expression to say that a theory is so incomplete that it could not be used to make predictions, and it is impossible to verify whether it is wrong or not. This expression is often used for pseudoscientific theories or argumentations.
Idiographic Induction: It is a method based on the analysis, in great details, of single cases or events. “This is the task of historians, for example, who are interested in a particular event or period and proceed like a criminal investigator in a detective story to find out ‘what really was happened’” ( Morlino, Berg-Schlosser, & Badie, 2017 , p. 15)
Executive Functions: They are a set of cognitive skills that are needed for self-control and managing behaviors. They include self-control, working memory, and mental flexibility.
Nomothetic Deduction: It is a method aimed at establishing general patterns and regularities by analyzing a large amount of data ( nomos in ancient Greek means law ).
Constructivism: In education, constructivism is a learning theory based on the idea that people actively construct or make their own knowledge. Basically, learners use their previous knowledge to acquire new notions.
Gentrification: It is a process of urban development whereby the character of a poor urban area is changed by wealthier people moving in.