We’re excited to announce that we are offering a new MSc by Research in the Psychology of Creativity and Performance Expertise, here at the University of Buckingham, with entry dates in September and January each year. This MSc is ideal for those with a first degree in Psychology who wish to take their knowledge further in this exciting field. Students can be full- or part-time.
Philip Fine tells us about a new collection of articles looking at novel ways of researching creativity.
What is creativity? Why are some people more creative than others? What do we know about the creative process? How do people decide whether one product is more creative than another?
Research has attempted to answer questions like these for decades, and made great progress in doing so. We can observe creativity in all domains of human thought, behaviour and experience, for instance creative cognition (insight, divergent thinking and creative problem-solving) and artistic performance (music, dance, art, design).
Many disciplines investigate creativity, including psychology, neuroscience, performance science, education, linguistics and philosophy. But we can ask: what’s new in the world of creativity research? What novel methods and approaches have been developed over the last few years?
To answer this question, Dr Philip Fine and Dr Kathryn Friedlander of our very own CREATE hub, together with Dr Amory Danek, Dr Ian Hocking and Professor Bill Thompson, have been co-editing a special issue of the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychology, entitled: Novel Approaches for Studying Creativity in Problem-Solving and Artistic Performance. It contains 27 articles showcasing the ‘state of the art’ in creativity research, and our recently published over-arching Editorial.
Over the next few months, we will be publishing a number of blog articles discussing some of the contents of these 27 articles. For the moment, please have a look at our conference poster which was presented at the ESCoP conference in September. For more information, do go and read our Editorial, which will give you a flavour of the special issue.
Dr. Philip Fine is Senior Lecturer in Psychology and co-director of the CREATE Research Hub at the University of Buckingham.
Image: Shutterstock 225930193, under licence.
Join the University of Buckingham’s CREATE-hub researcher Dr. Gill Hill as she talks about her creativity research alongside Professor James Kaufman, in the latest BPS Research Digest podcast.
Gill Hill asks us to consider whether we are perpetuating the stereotype of the ‘creative white male’ in the incidental references to ‘Creative Greats’ we use in our talks and publications.
Kathryn Friedlander reviews David Astle’s fascinating guide to cryptic crosswords. Should we all consider taking up cryptic crossword solving, as the book suggests, to ‘improve our memory and boost the power and agility of our brain’?
Continue readingKathryn Friedlander takes a look at an alternative way of studying expertise, the Grounded Expertise Components Approach, suggesting that this might address some pitfalls of previous research.
We’ve all seen the long-running arguments over ‘expertise’ … Are the world’s greatest performers endowed at birth with a lucky genetic advantage? Or are they trained to excel through 10,000 hours of gruelling practice? Or perhaps a blend of both?
Continue readingKathryn Friedlander explores the ‘kick’ we get from cracking a really good cryptic crossword clue.
A number of stories in the press earlier this year reported work carried out in Vienna and London on solving puzzles in a brain scanner. The study suggested that solving a clue to a puzzle can trigger a highly rewarding ‘Aha!’ (or ‘Eureka!’) insight moment, which releases dopamine into the brain. This is the reward chemical associated with daily activities such as eating, winning money … and having sex. This led to headlines promising that cryptic crosswords were ‘better than sex’… but what’s the reality behind the hype?
