Creativity and Well-Being: A Meta-Analysis

Creativity and well-being are popular subjects in psychological and organizational studies. The recent literature presented mixed perspectives about the nature of the relationship between the two. Whereas the mad-genius hypothesis, which was often explored among eminently creative individuals, seems to imply a negative relationship between the two, trends in the field of creativity, such as everyday creativity and general psychology (i.e., positive psychology) linked them positively. The present meta-analysis study synthesized 189 effect sizes obtained from 32 samples in 26 different studies based on a total sample of 8,189. Analyses with multilevel modeling yielded a mean effect of r = 0.14. The moderator analysis tested the impact of age, gender, measure of creativity, measure of well-being, stimulus type of creativity measure, and index of creativity measure. Only the creativity measure explained the variation in the study outcomes. The relationship between creativity and well-being was significantly higher when creativity was measured by instruments focusing on creative activity and behavior (r = 0.22) than the divergent thinking tasks (r = 0.06). Those findings are discussed in terms of theoretical and practical implications.