Personality and creativity in art and writing: Innovation motivation, psychoticism, and (mal)adjustment

Undergraduates (N = 68) completed inventories measuring innovation motivation (need to be different and innovation expectancy), psychoticism, extraversion, neuroticism, and symptomatic distress, its well as a sentence completion measure of adjustment. They also, an associative procedure and completed house-tree-person wrote lyric poems Using drawings. Poems were scored for originality and arousal potential and independently judged for quality by two college writing instructors. Drawings were scored for original features and independently judged for quality by two art therapists. The need to be different and current adjustment problems correlated significantly with both originality scores and judged creativity on both tasks, often interacting to explain much of the variance in creativity. Innovation expectancy and psychoticism displayed significant correlations with some creativity measures. Originality scoring and expert judgment correlated well on both tasks. Originality and judged creativity correlated significantly across creative domains. supporting a domain-general view of creativity.