Search

Background: Creativity and responsibility are enhanced by meditation among adults, but such effects have not been studied in adolescents. Moreover, the determinants of the ethical effect (such as responsibility) of meditation are unclear. Aims: To address this gap by investigating the impact of digital in-class meditation programmes in middle school, focusing on intentions (self-centred vs. responsibility-centred), on adolescents' creative potential and sense of responsibility. These intentions are operationalized by different purpose-based meditations. Methods: We conducted a cluster randomized controlled trial involving 107 year 7 adolescents from six classes, assigning them to two experimental groups and an active control group. Pre- and post-intervention assessments were conducted over an 11-week period, including a creativity (EPoC) test comprising four exercises (graphic and verbal, divergent and convergent thinking), a responsibility and a mindfulness scale. Results: Our findings revealed no discernible effects on divergent thinking or self-reported mindfulness. However, we observed significant differences in graphic and verbal convergent creative thinking, as well as impacting responsibility scores, between a responsibility-centred meditation group and a self-centred meditation group. Moreover, distinctions were noted between control and self-centred meditation groups and between some classes. Effect sizes indicated that the interventions had a moderate but significant impact on the variables measured. Conclusion: Our study reveals the effectiveness of digital meditation interventions in enhancing convergent creative thinking and responsibility among middle-school students. Notably, it shed new light on the importance of meditation intentions, which may be as significant as the form of meditation itself.

Education today is evolving to foster essential psychosocial skills like creativity, critical thinking, and responsibility, equipping students for 21st-century challenges. However, it is crucial to examine the motivations driving these changes and their alignment with broader societal goals beyond merely economic interests. This article explores the ethical dimensions of creativity, recognizing its potential for both positive innovation and harm. It emphasizes the neutrality of creativity and the importance of evaluating the intentions and consequences behind creative acts, not just their outcomes. We introduce and define the concept of ''responsible creativity,'' characterized by the ability to generate original ideas, behaviors, or objects while considering the moral and legal repercussions of one's actions, both in the present and future. This concept is anchored in the ethics of conviction and responsibility, promoting a fundamental commitment to avoid harm and enhance well-being. Our model of responsible creativity incorporates qualities such as benevolence, flexibility, positivity, reliability, accountability, reflexivity, and wisdom. We advocate for nurturing this type of creativity in educational settings through innovative approaches such as board and video games, philosophy workshops, wisdom education, and mindfulness meditation. These pedagogical methods aim to cultivate future leaders who are ethically aware and capable of using their creativity to positively impact society and the environment. By navigating the interplay of creativity and ethics, this article provides valuable insights and practical guidance for educators and policymakers striving to create a more ethically conscious and innovative educational landscape.

Abstract Education today is evolving to foster essential psychosocial skills like creativity, critical thinking, and responsibility, equipping students for 21st-century challenges. However, it is crucial to examine the motivations driving these changes and their alignment with broader societal goals beyond merely economic interests. This article explores the ethical dimensions of creativity, recognizing its potential for both positive innovation and harm. It emphasizes the neutrality of creativity and the importance of evaluating the intentions and consequences behind creative acts, not just their outcomes. We introduce and define the concept of ‘‘responsible creativity,’’ characterized by the ability to generate original ideas, behaviors, or objects while considering the moral and legal repercussions of one's actions, both in the present and future. This concept is anchored in the ethics of conviction and responsibility, promoting a fundamental commitment to avoid harm and enhance well-being. Our model of responsible creativity incorporates qualities such as benevolence, flexibility, positivity, reliability, accountability, reflexivity, and wisdom. We advocate for nurturing this type of creativity in educational settings through innovative approaches such as board and video games, philosophy workshops, wisdom education, and mindfulness meditation. These pedagogical methods aim to cultivate future leaders who are ethically aware and capable of using their creativity to positively impact society and the environment. By navigating the interplay of creativity and ethics, this article provides valuable insights and practical guidance for educators and policymakers striving to create a more ethically conscious and innovative educational landscape.

An investment perspective on creativity, proposed 30 years ago, no longer seems adequate, nor do various revisions of the model made since then. The world, or at least the way many people experience it, has changed and so have the challenges for creativity. In particular, creativity is being used to increasingly greater effect in negative ways and in ways that lack integrity with respect both to internal coherence and external correspondence to the world. To understand creativity and adequately teach it, people need to take into account its positivity and its integrity with respect to internal coherence and external correspondence.

This theoretical article proposes a unified framework of analysis for the constructs of intelligence and creativity. General definitions for intelligence and creativity are provided, allowing fair comparisons between the two context-embedded constructs. A novel taxonomy is introduced to classify the contexts in which intelligent and/or creative behavior can be embedded, in terms of the tightness vs. looseness of the relevant conceptual space S and available time T. These two dimensions are used to form what is identified as the space-time continuum, containing four quadrants: tight space and tight time, loose space and tight time, tight space and loose time, loose space and loose time. The intelligence and creativity constructs can be mapped onto the four quadrants and found to overlap more or less, depending on the context characteristics. Measurement methodologies adapted to the four different quadrants are discussed. The article concludes with a discussion about future research directions based on the proposed theoretical framework, in terms of theories and hypotheses on intelligence and creativity, of eminent personalities and personality traits, as well as its consequences for developmental, educational, and professional environments.

The current study aimed to investigate whether board games could be used to improve creative potential. Games have proven to be effective learning tools, and some studies have indicated positive links between creativity and other types of games, namely video games and role-playing games. However, less is known regarding board games' potential benefits on creativity. This exploratory study compared two types of board games: creative and non-creative board games. We used a within-subject repeated-measurement design, in which participants played to both types of games, across two sessions separated by one week. We assessed creative potential with a divergent thinking task, using fluency and originality as indicators. We controlled for openness, mood states, and enjoyment. Results suggest an improvement of originality after playing both types of games, whereas no differences were observed for fluency. Considering the base level of participants, we found improvement for low-performing participants specifically, in both fluency and originality, although analyses' limited statistical power may have impacted the findings. These findings provide a first step in the study of creativity and board games and suggest they could help temporarily improve one's divergent thinking capacity.

Although diverse European policy initiatives have been developed to integrate young NEETs -- "Not in Employment, Education or Training", it is particularly relevant to question how NEETs are perceived by their counterparts who are actively engaged in society. For this reason, we aimed to examine the Social Representations (SRs) of NEETs in France, using the classic free evocation technique. French NEETs (n = 71) and matched controls (n = 66; people employed, in education or in training) were interviewed. Results showed the scope of SRs for the semantic field of the term NEET and its associated terms. The need to develop effective communication to talk about work, education, and training with NEETs and implications for career counselling are discussed.

This manifesto, discussed by 20 scholars, representing diverse lines of creativity research, marks a conceptual shift within the field. Socio-cultural approaches have made substantial contributions to the concept of creativity over recent decades and today can provide a set of propositions to guide our understanding of past research and to generate new directions of inquiry and practice. These propositions are urgently needed in response to the transition from the Information Society to the Post-Information Society. Through the propositions outlined here, we aim to build common ground and invite the community of creativity researchers and practitioners to reflect up, study, and cultivate creativity as a socio-cultural phenomenon.

Creativity can be considered a key resource in human development, education and adaptation. It is often defined as the ability to generate novel productions (ideas or work) that are valuable in their context and are also frequently surprising. In the context of the 21st century skills movement, creativity is systematically cited as a life skill, together with critical thinking, collaboration and communication skills. In this article, we explore the role of creativity in vocational guidance and suggest how it may be further integrated into discussions of career counselling. The article first offers a collection of perspectives from the French guidance counselling literature, educational guidance and training perspectives. This material illustrates the pivotally important modern expansion of the field's mission from helping students making career choices to that of providing individuals of all kinds with the skills and perspective necessary to begin the lifelong process of building their own 'life project'. In this expanded vision of career counselling, we argue that the understanding and development of an individuals' creativity becomes even more centrally important.

The aim of this study was to explore whether Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVE) improve the creativity of users regardless of their creative potential profile. The study involved brainstorming sessions in two settings: a real meeting room (RE) and a similar meeting room in a virtual environment (VE). Twenty groups of three users of public transport were randomly assigned to one of the two conditions and performed a brainstorming task on how to improve mobility in Paris. The results indicated that, at the team level, fluency, and originality were significantly improved by working in VE compared to RE. However, at the individual level, the results suggested that VE did not favor everyone. Participants in VE with high risk-taking propensity were significantly more creative (fluency and originality) than the other participants (e.g., those with a similar profile in RE as well as participants with low scores in risk taking in VE). A similar trend was observed for divergent thinking and mental flexibility but to a lesser extent. The results suggest that VE offered an atmosphere of freedom that disinhibited the participants with a high risk-taking propensity, divergent thinking, and mental flexibility abilities.

This article presents the concept of creative potential and its link to talent. Psychological measures to assess creative potential in children and adolescents (EPoC) and adults (Creative Profiler) are then described. Implications for developing creativity are proposed.

This paper examines the contrast and distinction between divergent and convergent scientific creativity, and the paradoxical relationship of scientific creativity with cultural factors in elementary students. With a newly developed measure of potential for scientific creativity, EPoC Science (Lubart et al., in press), students produce ideas in response to scientific problems, and both divergent-exploratory as well as convergent-integrative processes involved in scientific creativity are analyzed. An empirical study (n = 118) was conducted in France with elementary school children (ages 7-10). The divergent-exploratory task was scored for fluency and statistical uniqueness. For the convergent-integrative task, the number of concepts that a student integrated and synthesized, and the originality of the synthesis were scored. Results showed that divergent and convergent task performances were weakly related to each other. This suggests that divergence and convergence are two relatively distinct processes for scientific creativity, and that the relation is more complex than commonly assumed. In terms of culture-related variables, immigrant cultural background (number of family members born outside of France) was significantly and negatively correlated with the originality of divergent and convergent scientific creativity. Findings are discussed and educational implications are proposed.

In this study, we explored whether creativity was domain specific or domain general. The relationships between students' scores on three creative problem-solving activities (math, spatial artistic, and oral linguistic) in the DISCOVER assessment (Discovering Intellectual Strengths and Capabilities While Observing Varied Ethnic Responses) and the TCT-DP (Test of Creative Thinking-Drawing Production), a non-verbal general measure of creativity, were examined. The participants were 135 first and second graders from two schools in the Southwestern United States from linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds. Pearson correlations, canonical correlations, and multiple regression analyses were calculated to describe the relationship between the TCT-DP and the three DISCOVER creative problem-solving activities. We found that creativity has both domain-specific and domain-general aspects, but that the domain-specific component seemed more prominent. One implication of these results is that educators should consider assessing creativity in specific domains to place students in special programs for gifted students rather than relying only on domain-general measures of divergent thinking or creativity.

Drawing on the Theory of Planned Behavior, this research investigates factors determining managers' intention to innovate contextualized within the situation of a new management practice implementation: telework. Managers' attitude toward telework, their attitude toward ideation and their perception of organizational support for creativity were identified as potential determinants of managers' intentions to innovate in order to implement telework. However, according to the Theory of Planned Behavior, such effects are mediated by attitude toward innovative behaviors and perceived behavioral control. A sample of managers (N = 91) who never implemented telework completed an online questionnaire designed to assess these factors. Results from a path analysis confirmed the predictive model with the exception that attitude toward ideation had a stronger direct effect on attitude toward innovative behaviors than expected. Results are discussed in terms of their extension to the actual creation of innovative behaviors and their generalizability to decontextualized reported intentions to innovate, offering potential avenues for future research.