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.