Emotions and Familiarity of Content in Generative Processes of Prospective Artists

Abstract

Relations between creativity, dimensions of emotional experience (valence and arousal), and familiarity of content were examined in an experiment with 92 students, grouped into two sub-samples: art and non-art students. For stimulation, 40 photos were selected from the Nencki Affective Picture System, so that the values of the dimensions were systematically varied. Students were exposed to the photos and asked to rate the familiarity of their content, and then to generate a creative title for each of them. Measuring creativity was based on the coefficients, specially constructed and derived from the assessment of titles’ originality. The analysis shows that valence, arousal, and familiarity might be the predictors of creativity and that unpleasant and novel content induces more creative answers. Generative processes of art-students show certain peculiarities: they are more sensitive to the external clues, especially novel and disturbing, which might be explained by the action model of creativity.