Conceptualizing and Measuring Ability Emotional Creativity

Individual differences in our capacity to be emotionally creative may be associated with positive life outcomes. Emotional creativity was introduced as a typical behavior construct as well as a construct of maximal performance. Ability emotional creativity is in line with a recent taxonomy of creativity that stresses the method of inquiry as essential. Grounded in creativity research, we developed several ability measures in which fluency and originality are crucial. To ensure the nomothetic breadth, task development was based on factors of ability emotional intelligence and covered creativity in the perception, understanding, and management of emotions. A sample of N = 142 (M-age = 24.17 years) adults completed nine newly developed ability emotional creativity tasks, one existing ability emotional creativity task (Emotional Triad) that was adapted for the German language, and eight established (cognitive) creativity tasks. The creativity was rated by three trained coders (fluency intraclass correlation coefficients: M = .98, SD = .02, originality ICCs: M = .76, SD = .08) and all tasks had acceptable internal consistency (?(H): M = .85, SD = .09). Performance on the ability emotional creativity tasks was best modeled with three correlated factors (fluency in emotion perception, fluency in emotion understanding/management, and emotional originality). All factors were highly correlated with, yet distinct from, cognitive fluency and cognitive originality. They were also uniquely related with self-reported emotional creativity. This indicates individuals showed some awareness of their abilities. These results support that ability emotional creativity should rely on fluency and originality of maximal cognitive effort measures.