It all start with me doodling and making mandalas. One day i got a compliment about how creative person i was, so as I am majoring in psychology I decided to read and search for the relationship between creativity and psychology and why not making a presentation about it.

1. Creativity and Psychology
A general introduction
by
Yahya Fehdi

2. INDEX
1. Definition of creativity
2. Types of creativity
3. Creativity and Intelligence
4. The measuring of creativity
5. The motives of creativity
6. The barriers of creativity
7. Characteristics of creative persons
8. Strategies for enhancing creative-thinking skills
9. References

3. Definition of creativity
• David Bohm in his book on creativity wrote
“Creativity is in my view something that is
impossible to define in words”.
• Reid and Petcoz; Creativity is viewed in different
ways in different disciplines.
• Cannatella; The need for creativity is biologically,
physically and psychologically an essential part of
human nature, and it’s necessary for human
reproduction, growth and cultural striving .
• Generally creativity; is a mental ability that makes
the person to search and product new things.

4. Types of creativity
• The word ”creative ” evokes images of novelists, poet,
composers, and visual artists.
• C. P. Snow, is a physicist and novelist at the same time,
argued that there is no boundaries between artistic
and scientific thinking and creativity.
• Donald N. MacKinnon; there is three kinds of
creativity:
1. Artistic creativity; reflects the creator’s inner needs, perceptions
and motivations.
2. Scientific and technological creativity; deals with some
environmental problems and results in novel solutions but
exhibits little of the inventor’s personality.
3. Hybrid creativity; in which we see the exhibition of both a novel
problem solution and the personality of the creator.
• Yet, all kinds of creativity share common
characteristics.

5. Creativity and Intelligence
• The use of the term “creativity” to refer to
individuals who make creative contributions is
relatively modern.
• Lewis Terman; in his study called “Genetics
Studies of Genius”, found out that having a
high IQ is a different mental trait than being
creative.
• Getzels and Jackson; creativity and
intelligence were largely independent traits.

6. Creativity and Intelligence
• Reeves and Clark; all available tests of creativity
suggest there is merely a relationship between
intelligence and creativity.
• The idea that the more intelligent individual is
necessarily the most creative person is fallacious.
• Hasan and Butcher; found creativity and
intelligence so highly correlated that they were
almost indistinguishable.
• The creativity needs a certain reasonable level of
intelligence to be active

7. The measuring of creativity
• J. P. Guilford ; is considerate to be the first
psychologist who create a psychometric study
of human creativity.
• Reeves and Clark; The creativity tests are
somewhat invalid because of the subject
nature of the elements they measure and the
lack of any predetermined right answer.
• There is two types of the tests of creativity:
Verbal tests and Formal tests.

8. The measuring of creativity
1. The verbal measurements:
• We give to a person a list of tools that we use in our
daily life and we ask him or her to give us other and
new ways of using such a tool or thing.
• We gave to a person an untitled short story and we
ask him or her to give us the most numbers of titles
that are convenient to such a story.
• We ask the person to give us a tool or even a thing
that its indirectly related to some descriptions
• We present some unusual situations to a person and
we ask that person to give us as much as possible of
the results related to such situations.

9. The measuring of creativity
2. The formal measurements:
• We give a bunch of lines to a person and we ask him
or her to give us a meaningful drawing using those
lines.
• We give an incomplete draws to a person and we ask
him to make complete forms or designs from those
draws.
• We give a draw of a tool or a thing to a person and we
ask him to give us as many unusual ways of using such
a tool.
• We give the person a picture and we ask him to write
a story about the picture.

10. The motives of creativity
• Basically there is three kinds of motivation
that motivate a person to create:
1. External motivations; or for practical goals.
2. Internal motivations; or for personal needs.
3. Motivations related to the creative work itself.

11. The motives of creativity
1. The Extern-Motivations:
• The physical rewards (such as; money) does not
play a main character in motivating a person to
create something.
• It may be considerate as a helper or a facilitator
into creating something new, especially in the
scientific domains, but it’s not the main purpose
of motivating a person to create.

12. The motives of creativity
2. The Intern-Motivations:
• There is a lot of evidences that prove the
existence of many of the personal motives
that make the creative persons so unique,
such as:
 General motivation: it’s basically the willing and
the desire that a person has when he’s aiming to
achieve a personal goal.
But if the motivation is in a state of overdosing, then
the abilities and enthusiasm will be weak.

13. The motives of creativity
The independency in judgment and thinking;
the presence of the willing to not copying
others.
The self-esteem; the independency in
judgment acquire the presence of a
reasonable level of the self-esteem.
The urge to come up with new creative inputs
towards a specific topic.

14. The motives of creativity
The motive to interact with others; in order to
put a meaning to his creations, the creations
who has a lack of this meaning they are
usually considerate to be a harmful creations.
The motive to deal with complex and new
ideas and things.

15. The motives of creativity
3. The creative work itself:
• Its when the work itself makes the person
willing and wanting to finish it and to
accomplish it.
• The creative work contains in itself the
rewards for the person who done it.
• Maini and Moredbeek; its more like a
religious feeling in what it has from emotions
while doing it.

16. The barriers of creativity
• For this part we will be talking about two main
kinds of barriers:
Personal Barriers
Social Barriers

17. The barriers of creativity
Personal barriers:
– Penchant to adapt the general or most known
ideas and point of view by his society or
environment towards something.
– Having a very low level of intelligence.
– Intellectual hardness, the inability of the person to
deal with new minds sits or systems.
– The emotional side; the more depressed and sad
the person the more he or she couldn’t create or
thing about new things.

18. The barriers of creativity
 Social barriers:
– Social values; that doesn’t create a suitable
environment by encouraging the values of “the
easy way to success” and/or “the important of
the external power”.
– The rules of some societies help and encourage
the person to be creative and have the free-well
in his choices, yet other societies with their rules
they kill the creativity in that person.

19. Characteristics of creative persons
1. Originality; the ability to produce unsual ideas to
solve problems in unusual ways and to use
things or situations in an unusual manner.
2. Presistence; the willing if necessary to devote
long hours to a given task . Creative people are
willing to face failure. Frustrations seem to
motivate them to increased effort.
3. Independence; creative people are independent
thinkers who look for the unusual the
unexplored.

20. Characteristics of creative persons
4. Involevement and Detachment; after the
problem has been identified the creative person
starts researching how others have tried to solve
it. Thus Involvement sets the stage for their own
creations. Creative persons soon become
detached enough to seet the problem in its total
perspective.
5. Deferment and Immediacy; ceative people resist
the tendency to judge too soon. They do not
accept the first solution.

21. Characteristics of creative persons
6. Incubation; by putting the problem aside
temporarily and letting the brain automatically
making various associations and connections
between the neurons to come up with a unique
solution.
7. Verification; although illumination provides the
necessary impetus and direction for solving a
problem the solutionmust be verified through
conventional objective procedures.

22. Characteristics of creative persons
8. Discovers problems; beside being a problems
solvers creative persons are also problem
finders. Getzels&Csikswentmihalyi believe
that potentially creative learners prefer to
work in problems they discover themselves.
9. Generated alternatives; finding different
ways of viewing problems. In creative
thinking, one deliberately searches for as
many alternatives as possible.

23. Characteristics of creative persons
10.Challenges basic assumptions; in solving
problems one must begin with basic
assumptions, from any ideas that can provide
the foundational structure for problem solving.
11.Minimizes categories; even though one risks to
misrepresenting information by using labels
because they remain permanent and
contributes to rigid thinking , its convenient to
function with relatively few categories.

24. Strategies for enhancing creative-
thinking skills
1. Make a start: too often a person defers actions
until the mood strikes or until one can find the
right time.
2. Taking notes: most creative individuals carry a
pencil and note pad with them at all times.
3. Setting deadlines and quotas: the pressure of
deadlines tends to force one to become more
efficient in carrying out daily routines that take
time away from creative effort.
4. Fixing a time and a place: this one is basically for
the activity of thinking up ideas.

25. References
• The Journal of Effective Teaching, Vol. 7, No. 1,
2007 31-43
• Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience – Vol 10. No
2. 2008
• Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience – Vol 14. No
1. 2012
‫د‬/‫إبراهيم‬ ‫الستار‬ ‫عبد‬–‫النفس‬ ‫وعلم‬ ‫اإلنسان‬–‫فبراير‬1975
• Guilford J. P. A source book of creative
thinking. New York: Seribner, 1962