Artistic and Everyday Creativity: An Act-Frequency Approach

Scholars often distinguish everyday creativity and creativity in more formal domains, such as the arts. However, everyday creativity has been rather neglected in research. This paper compares artistic and everyday creativity. Three studies examine the content of behavior in artistic and everyday creativity, as well as similarities and differences in their relationships with personality traits, psychological well-being, and psychopathology. Typical artistic creativity acts referred to time investment in the arts, generation of art works, and achievement in the arts, whereas typical everyday creativity acts concerned humor and self-expression in daily activities. Both kinds of creativity were related to openness to experience, a personality trait described as the disposition towards creativity. However, artistic creativity was related to higher rates of psychopathology, while everyday creativity was related to extraversion, conscientiousness, and personal growth