Creativity in Adulthood :: Creative Creativity Essays

Creativity in AdulthoodCreativity is a concept surrounded by a number of beliefs and misconceptions. batch believe it is limited to only a few it declines seriously with age and it is associated primarily with uniqueness or innovation or artists (Adams-Price 1998 McCormick and Plugge 1997 Runco 1996). However, research shows that imaginative opinion is a universal ability that can help adults manage satisfying lives and that is increasingly in demand in the workplace. This Digest reviews some of this research in order to identify ways to help adults discover and fulfill their creative potential. Nature or Nurture?What is creativity? Torrances definition is often cited sensitivity to problems, deficiencies, and gaps in information making guesses, formulating hypotheses evaluating and testing and communicating results (McCracken 1998). Creativity is a complex of traits, skills, and capacities, including the ability to work autonomously, curiosity, unconventional thinking, openness t o experience, and tolerance of ambiguity (Adams-Price 1998 Albert 1996). Highly creative adults exhibit deep knowledge of and a strong bond with their subject matter, as well as intrinsic motivation (Amabile 1996 Keegan 1996).Creativity research has focus on personality traits of creative individuals (Amabile 1996). This emphasis has led to the assumptions that creativity is largely innate or immutable and creative people are distinct from noncreative people. Recently, more attention is being paid to social and environmental factors that influence creativity. Newer definitions describe creativity as the confluence of cognitive processes, knowledge, thinking style, personality, motivation, and environment over the purport span (Adams-Price 1998 Sasser-Coen 1993). It is also associated with the creation of meaning and the drive for psychic wholeness (Creativity in Later Life 1991), a way to address and cut off dissatisfactions and improve the quality of life (Adams-Price 1998), an d a profound reception to the limits and uncertainties of existence (Creativity in Later Life 1991, p. 9). For some people, creativity is an adaptive, innovative response to environmental sources of distress such as early death of a parent or other family problems, misfortunes, or conflicts (Adams-Price 1998 Albert 1996), whereas in other people the heading mechanisms might be substance abuse, depression, or withdrawal (McCormick and Plugge 1997). A growing body of research is examining how environmental factors affect the creativity of men and women in divergent ways. For many women, creative expression is limited by their education and training, cultural standards, lack of social support, and traditional gender expectations. Pohlman (1996) finds that, for men, creative identity is balanced by the experience of parenthood for women, the two roles conflict.