Eminent Creativity Everyday Creativity And Health

Eminent Creativity, Everyday Creativity, and Health brings together key past and present cutting-edge papers in the hot area of creativity and mental health. Included are major papers that have attracted interest in the international press (including the New York Ties, Japan's Asahi Weekly, and New Scientist in England). Other emphases include creativity and unhappy childhoods, coping with adversity, and immune function and health. Nowhere else is all this material available in one place, together with helpful integration and synthesis. For anyone interested in creativity and health, this book offers a one-stop shopping approach.

"What is everyday creativity? A capacity, a strategy, a process, all of these. It is a capability that is an intimate part of our daily lives and our personalities, yet it remains, for most of us, underdeveloped and, unfortunately, underacknowledged. Editor and leading creativity researcher Ruth Richards writes, "Everyday creativity is ... fundamental to our very survival. With our everyday creativity, we adapt flexibly, we improvise, we try different options, whether we are raising a child, counseling a friend, fixing our home, or planning a fundraising event." In this provocative collection, an interdisciplinary group of eminent thinkers offer their thoughts on how embracing creativity--tapping into the "originality of everyday life"--An lead to improved physical and mental health and to new ways of thinking and experiencing the world and ourselves. They show how our creativity can help us live "in the moment," refine our views of human nature at an individual and a societal level, find spiritual meaning, and, ultimately, change our paradigms for survival-and for flourishing-in a world fraught with urgent challenges. Neither a dry treatise nor a manual, this anthology draws upon the latest research in the area to present a lively examination of the phenomenon and process of everyday creativity and its far-reaching ramifications for self, society, politics, human and cultural evolution, and our future"--Jacket. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved).

As human beings we all have creative potential, a quality essential to human development and a vital component to healthy and happy lives. However this may often remain stifled by the choices we make, or ways in which we choose to live in our daily lives. Framed by the “Four Ps of Creativity” – product, person, process, press – this book offers an alternative understanding of the fundamentals of ordinary creativity. Ruth Richards highlights the importance of “process”, circumventing our common preoccupation with the product, or creative outcome, of creativity. By focusing instead on the creator and the creative process, she demonstrates how we may enhance our relationships with life, beauty, future possibilities, and one another. This book illustrates how our daily life styles and choices, as well as our environments, may enable and allow creativity; whereas environments not conducive to creative flow may kill creative potential. Also explored are questions of ‘normality’, beauty and nuance in creativity, as well as creative relationships.

In this provocative collection of essays, an interdisciplinary group of eminent thinkers and writers offer their thoughts on how embracing creativity - tapping into the originality of everyday life - can lead to improved physical and mental health, to new ways of thinking, of experiencing the world and ourselves. They show how creativity can refine our views of human nature at an individual and societal level and, ultimately, change our paradigms for survival - and for flourishing - in a world fraught with urgent challenges.

This book is about redefining the value to health of creativity. Creativity derives from biological changes during human evolution as a tool that is needed for survival. The successful use of creativity generates feelings of pleasure and self-esteem that are beneficial to health. In particular, it can help depression. Current values do not give adequate importance to creativity, and the author challenges these values in this book. The book contains contributed chapters on a theory of creativity as an innate capacity, the therapeutic benefits of creativity, factors that encourage or inhibit creativity and current research on these, and accounts of creativity both as individual projects and as groupwork.

Creativity influences each of our lives and is essential for the advancement of society. The first edition of the successful Encyclopedia of Creativity helped establish the study of creativity as a field of research in itself. The second edition, published in 2011, was named a 2012 Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association's Choice publication. Featuring 232 chapters, across 2 volumes, the third edition of this important work provides updated information on the full range of creativity research. There has been an enormous increase in research on the topic throughout the world in many different disciplines. Some areas covered in this edition include the arts and humanities, business, education, mental and physical health, neuroscience, psychology, the creative process and technology. Fundamental subjects are discussed such as the definition of creativity, the development and expression of creativity across the lifespan, the environmental conditions that encourage or discourage creativity, the relationship of creativity to mental health, intelligence and learning styles, and the process of being creative. Creativity is discussed within specific disciplines including acting, architecture, art, dance, film, government, interior design, magic, mathematics, medicine, photography, science, sports, tourism and writing. A wide range of topics are covered. Here is a partial overview by topic: Business and organizational creativity: Advertising, Creative Economies, Creativity Consulting and Coaching, Corporate Creativity, Creativity Exercises, Entrepreneurship, Group Dynamics, Innovation, Leadership, Management of Creative People, Patents, Teams, and Training. The Cognitive Aspects of Creativity: Altered and Transitional States, Analogies, Attention, Breadth of Attention, Cognitive Style, Divergent Thinking, Flow and Optimal Experience, Knowledge, Logic and Reasoning, Metacognition, Mental Models, Memory, Metaphors, Mind Wandering, Mindfulness, Problem-Finding, Problem-Solving, and Remote Associates. The Creative Process: Attribution, Constraints, Discovery, Insight, Inspiration, Intentionality, Motivation, Risk-Taking, and Tolerance for Ambiguity. Education: Children’s Creativity, , Education, Intelligence, Knowledge, Metacognition, Play, Prodigies, Programs And Courses, Talent And Teaching Creativity. Neuroscience Research: Cellular Matter, Grey Matter, Cellular Density; EEG, Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (Fmri), Music and The Brain, Pupillometry, Systems, The Cerebellum and Transcranial Electrical Stimulation. Psychology: The Big 5 Personality Characteristics, Bipolar Mood Disorders, Childhood Trauma, Depression, Deviance, Dreams, Emotions, Expressive Arts, Grit, Introversion, Jungian Theory, Mad Genius Controversy, Openness, Schizotypy, Suicide, Therapy and Counseling Trauma and Transcendence and Transforming Illness and Visual Art. Social Aspects of Creativity: Awards, Birth Order, Criticism, Consensual Assessment, Diversity, Eminence, Families, Friendships and Social Networks, Geeks, Mentors, Millennials, Networking, Rewards, And Sociology. Society and Creativity: Awards, Climate For Creativity, Cross-Cultural Creativity, Destruction Of Creativity, Law And Society, Social Psychology, Social Transformation, Voting, War, and Zeitgeist. Technology: Chats, Computational Creativity, Computerized Text Analysis, Gaming, Memes, Networks and Maps, and Virtual Reality.

FIRST OF A SERIES OF FOUR EVERYDAY CREATIVITY (TM) BOOKS, this 1994 "lost book," by a prizewinning 21st century expert, was recently discovered. It introduces the vital concept of EVERYDAY CREATIVITY, "our originality of everyday life," often lost to those who think creativity is only about arts or sciences, or a few famous people. This is our human birthright-creativity as a process and way of life whether managing an office, organizing a fundraiser, parenting, teaching, gardening, fixing the car-or creating that painting. It is less what we do than how we do it. With creativity as a process WE TOO ARE THE CREATION; we come alive, find richness, inspiration, presence, joy, new realms of health-physical and psychological-and in the best cases, also intimacy, love, caring, a greater connection, and new views of world and self. Here too is help for those with anxiety, depression, a range of conflicts, parents wanting the best for their kids, and each of us seeking happiness and meaning in life.

An integrative introduction to the theories and themes in research on creativity, the second edition of Creativity is both a reference work and text for courses in this burgeoning area of research. The book begins with a discussion of the theories of creativity (Person, Product, Process, Place), the general question of whether creativity is influenced by nature or nurture, what research has indicated of the personality and style of creative individuals from a personality analysis standpoint, and how social context affects creativity. This wide-ranging work then proceeds to coverage of issues such as gender differences, whether creativity can be enhanced, if creativity is related to poor mental or physical health, and much more. The book contains boxes covering special interest items, including one-page biographies of famous creative individuals, and activities for a group or individual to test or encourage creativity, as well as references to Internet sites relating to creativity. Includes all major theories and perspectives on creativity Consolidates recent research into a single source Includes key terms defined and text boxes with interesting related material Single authored for clarity and consistency of presentation

How cognitive psychology explains human creativity Conventional wisdom holds that creativity is a mysterious quality present in a select few individuals. The rest of us, the common view goes, can only stand in awe of great creative achievements: we could never paint Guernica or devise the structure of the DNA molecule because we lack access to the rarified thoughts and inspirations that bless geniuses like Picasso or Watson and Crick. Presented with this view, today's cognitive psychologists largely differ finding instead that "ordinary" people employ the same creative thought processes as the greats. Though used and developed differently by different people, creativity can and should be studied as a positive psychological feature shared by all humans. Creativity: Understanding Innovation in Problem Solving, Science, Invention, and the Arts presents the major psychological theories of creativity and illustrates important concepts with vibrant and detailed case studies that exemplify how to study creative acts with scientific rigor. Creativity includes: * Two in-depth case studies--Watson and Crick's modeling of the DNA structure and Picasso's painting of Guernica-- serve as examples throughout the text * Methods used by psychologists to study the multiple facets of creativity * The "ordinary thinking" or cognitive view of creativity and its challengers * How problem-solving and experience relate to creative thinking * Genius and madness and the relationship between creativity and psychopathology * The possible role of the unconscious in creativity * Psychometrics--testing for creativity and how personality factors affect creativity * Confluence theories that use cognitive, personality, environmental, and other components to describe creativity Clearly and engagingly written by noted creativity expert Robert Weisberg, Creativity: Understanding Innovation in Problem Solving, Science, Invention, and the Arts takes both students and lay readers on an in-depth journey through contemporary cognitive psychology, showing how the discipline understands one of the most fundamental and fascinating human abilities. "This book will be a hit. It fills a large gap in the literature. It is a well-written, scholarly, balanced, and engaging book that will be enjoyed by students and faculty alike." --David Goldstein, University of Toronto

This book re-examines the common view that a high level of individual creativity often correlates with a heightened risk of mental illness.