Abstract
A physiological approach was employed to study the relationship between stress and creativity using a controlled experiment. We needed an accurate situation in which stress could be objectively introduced to subjects. We measured subjects’ galvanic skin response (GSR) and electrocardiogram (ECG) while implementing creative generation tasks. In this experiment, two stress manipulations were used in one of two groups (a stress group versus a non-stress group). A questionnaire survey was also given to subjects as a supplementary measurement. The physiological signals and perceived stress scale (PSS) indicated that the stress group experienced mental stress during the experiment. Our results showed that self-reported creativity did not correspond with an assessment by experts of participants’ creativity. We did not find a statistically significant relationship between stress and creativity in our experiment. In future studies of creativity under stress, we propose that researchers consider other factors and surroundings that may affect stress and creativity using various approaches, such as physiological and bioinformatical experiments, in order to shed light on inconsistent findings in the literature.
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This work was supported by the Korea Research Foundation Grant funded by the Korean Government (KRF-2009-342-B00015).
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Lee, D.S., Lee, K.C., Jo, N.Y. (2013). A Creative Generation Task Under Stress: Comparison of a Stress Group with a Non-stress Group. In: Lee, K. (eds) Digital Creativity. Integrated Series in Information Systems, vol 32. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5749-7_4
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