Creativity in the Making - Vygotsky’s Contemporary Contribution to Crativity

Moran & John-Steiner / 33 specific to and impetus for creativity: citing the art critic Bell, he discussed an “aesthetic emotion” as the start of any aesthetic production or consumption. Fischer’s (1998) skill theory supports this higher level of emotional complexity: basic emotions are mostly universal, whereas more complex emotions can differ across cultures and historical periods. Within creativity, creativity researchers have place emotion in numerous roles as well: as a discipliner for staying on task, a rewarder for completion, and a recognizer of the “right” solution (Russ, 1993), as an early distant warning system of problems (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996), as positive reinforcement for engaging in the creative process (Csikszentmihalyi’s flow, 1996), and perhaps even as a bridge between cognitive faculties in generating metaphors and concepts (Lubart & Getz, 1997).

Empirical work has shown that emotions – both positive and negative – seem to affect creativity. Isen’s (1998) extensive experimental work found that positive affect was associated with greater cognitive flexibility and improved creative problem solving across many settings and with different types of samples. Dovidio, Gaertner, Isen and Lowrance (1995) found that induced positive affect enables people to classify more flexibly and see commonalities more readily. However, Runco (1994, 1998), emphasized the role in creative thought of tension and negative affect caused by cultural and professional marginality, broken homes and emotional dissatisfaction.

Similarly, Rothenberg (1990), through his interviews with hundreds of creative people, found that they are driven to create, and what drives them is the attempt to work through sources of destructive feelings. From a Vygotskian perspective, then, how a person emotionally, not just cognitively, perceives his or her place within the social environment has a tremendous impact on his or her ability to flexibly – and perhaps creatively – respond to the possibilities inherent in that environment.