The Link between Temperament and Creativity

Introduction Background Humans faces numerous challenges arising from majorly stress and conflicts in life that interferes with them in one way or the other. These daily predicaments cause one to be temperamental. Temperament is a state where an individual’s behavior and emotions show anger (Drabick and Ribanowitz, 2017). Such altered emotions and actions deprive one sense of focus, reasoning rationally and even having a decorum behavior.

Researchers notes that temper is on the rise among children and adolescent individuals and as such it is becoming a major problem (Schimmel and Jacobs, 2011).Anger at time becomes chronic that one destroys things ,physical and verbal abuse ensues, unruly behavior and sometimes leads to suicide or homicide .For instance, Robin Williams, the famous Hollywood actor ,committed suicide out of depression. Problem statement In as much as there is considerable level of negative effect of anger, there is certain degree of anger that can propel creativity.

Creativity is a fresh and new ideas that transforms, propels and uplift in situations of stagnation or fall (Frese et al, 2013). Dr. Andrew McCulloch () says that anger under specific degree makes us operate effectively and efficiently since it is the root for our survival. This means that mild anger drives creativity in a person thus encouraging one to look for survival tactics. The hint is that, considerable anger relates with creativity. This paper therefore seeks to establish the relationship between anger and creativity.

Significance of the study Survival is all about understanding situation and adapting to it in manner that you become minimally affected (Frese et al 2013). The study has the primary objective of informing the general public on how to moderate their temper and to take advantage of stressful times and how to deal with conflicts. It seeks provide more information that other researchers and scholars left. Research Questions The research seeks to address the following questions: 1. How do anger affect the level of a person’s creativity? 2.

What causes chronic anger? 3. What are some of the measures that can be taken to supress anger? 4. How does a person feel when his or her creativity is affected by anger? Study hypotheses The study is based upon the following two hypotheses: 1.

H1 If under mild anger one is able to come up with good and insightful ideas then it depicts that average anger correlates with an increase in creativity 2 .H2 If under mild anger one is unable to come up with food ideas then moderate anger does not relate with creativity at all. Literature review The issue of the relationship between temper and creativity has become appoint of discussion among scholars and researchers as well. Proponents of anger facilitates creativity have brought different ideas and knowledge to support their notions.

Ford (2012) argues that angered people are more likely to be creative than the calm individuals. This is because temperamental people are able to brainstorm a particular subject matter in unstructured manner thus able to solve a particular thing as opposed to their fellow calm counterparts. The logic is that, when these two individual groups are brainstorming, the angered guys dedicate most of their thinking to that subject matter and begins questioning the consequences of an issue.

As compared to calm people, they tend to relax hence the attention on issue is not that emphasized thus they become les creative. Relationship between Temperament and Creativity Proposed Study Participants Thirty undergraduate students will be recruited to participate in this study. At least one student will represent each of the University academic departments. They will be recruited via Ashford University Facebook group. Most of the students are active Facebook users. So, a post inviting volunteers to participate in this study will be read by majority of the students.

Each participant will be compensated because they are expected to attend two different sessions. The study will be carried out according to the ethical standards set by Ashford University. Procedure All the participants will fill an informed consent form. The form will tell participants that they are participating in a study about temperament and creativity and their responses will not be used for any other purposes apart from this study.

Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) and Formal Characteristics of Behavior - Temperament Inventory (FCB-TI) questionnaire will be administered to participants. FCB-TI will be delivered first then TTCT. So, there will be two sessions. Each of the measures is described below: FCB-TI. This questionnaire was developed by Strelau and Zawadzi (FCB-TI; Strelau & Zawadzki, 1995). It is used to measure six temperament traits outlined by Regulative Theory of Temperament. The traits are briskness (BR) activity (AC), sensory sensitivity (SS), perseveration (PE), emotional reactivity (ER), and endurance (EN).

BR refers to the ability to change from one activity to another.AC is one's ability to engage in numerous activities that are stimulating. SS is the capacity to respond to weak sensory stimulations. ER is the tendency to respond intensively to emotional stimuli.PE refers to the tendency to maintain and repeat actions that are not appropriate anymore. EN is the capacity to behave efficiently in situations that require high external stimulation (Oniszczenko, Stanis?awiak, Dembi?ska-Krajewska, & Rybakowski, 2017) FCB- TI is a yes-no questionnaire that contains 120 items.

Each temperament trait - ER, SS, EN, AC, PE, and BR- has 20 items. The Cronbach alpha for each trait has been estimated to be: BR = 0.77, PE = 0.79, SS = 0.73, ER = 0.83, EN = 0.85, and AC = 0.84 (Oniszczenko et al., 2017) .Therefore, FCB-TI is highly reliable and consistent instrument for measuring an individual temperament. This questionnaire will be administered first to all participants. It will be undertaken in reserved rooms at the University. The score of each of the trait will be calculated. Temperament score is obtained by adding up the six traits scores. TTCT.

It developed by American Phycologist Ellise Paul Torrence. It is used to measure a person’s creativity (Chavez-Eakle, Lara, & Cruz-Fuentes, 2006). It comprises of several simple sub-tests or tasks which make up the overall test. The test materials consist of two sections- verbal and non-verbal. One of these tasks can be used to measure either specific aspects of a person’s creativity or to provide an overall comprehensive overview of individual creativity.

If an individual completes specific set tasks, a creativity score can be calculated only from their performances in the given sub-tasks. Verbal tests. In this section, there are seven different activities. Namely, just suppose, asking, guessing causes, product improvement, guessing consequences, unusual uses, and unusual questions (Torrance, 1998). These activities is scored using three metrics. That is fluency, flexibility, and originality.

During each of the seven verbal activities, a person who is being assessed (examinee) will be asked either one or several questions which are relevant to the activity of interest of the examiner. For example, first, if an examiner is interested in guessing causes, the person being assessed may be provided with a description of a certain situation. The person being assessed may then be asked to guess what might have been the cause which led to the described situation.

Secondly, if an examiner is interested in unusual uses, the person being assessed may be provided with a name of a certain object and asked to come up with many unusual uses of the object as much as they can. Non-verbal (figural) tasks. In this section, there are three main figural activities. Namely, picture construction, picture completion and lines or circle (Torrance, 1998). During these activities, an examinee will generally be provided with sheets of paper which contain some form of abstract or incomplete symbols or shapes.

The examinee will then be asked to make amendments or additions to the symbols or shapes in order to create something meaningful. For example, during lines and circles activity, an examinee may be provided with a sheet of paper containing 30 or more circles and asked to draw or sketch objects of which circles form a major component. It is useful for measuring fluency and flexibility to see how many and what variation the examinee can come up with.

These tasks are measured using five different metrics - fluency, elaboration, flexibility, resistance to premature closure and abstractness of titles (Chavez-Eakle et al., 2006). Flexibility is the capacity to move from one concept to another. Fluency is the number of relevant answers. Originality is unusual answers. Elaboration is the number of details for each answer. Resistance to premature closure refers to the capacity to remain open-minded. Abstractness of titles refers to one’s degree of abreaction.

TTCT tests are useful because it allows one to compare the creativity of different individuals. However, they are not freely available online. So, official TTCT materials will be obtained from the Torrance Center of Creative Studies. Due to time constraints, figural tests will only be administered. For activity I (picture construction), participants will be asked to draw a picture from apple shape provided on a sheet of paper as stimuli. For activity II (picture construction), participants will be required to complete incomplete figures.

Lastly, for activity III (lines or circles), participants will be asked to create pictures from 15 circles. After tests completion, each participant creativity index (CI) will be calculated.CI indicates the creative potential of an individual. Hypotheses and Analysis Hypothesis 1. A positive relationship exists between temperament traits and creativity index. It is expected that participants with high creativity score will have high temperament score. Roskes, Sligte, Nijstad, and Dreu (2013) carried out a study on the relationship between creativity and personality. They concluded that personality is related to creativity.

Since personality is closely related to temperament, it means that temperament correlates positively with creativity. Hypothesis 2. Briskiness (BR), activity (AC), perseveration (PE), sensory sensitivity (SS), and endurance (ER) positively correlates with creativity score. It is expected that participants with high creativity index will score highly in BR, AC, SS, PE, and ER scales. N?cka and Hlawacz, (2013) carried out a study on the relationship between creativity and temperament.

To measure creativity, they administered Urban and Jellen's Test for Creative Thinking-Drawing Production and word categorization task (WCT) tests to a sample of artists and bankers. Temperament was measured using FCB-TI. They concluded that creativity is positively correlated with BR, AC, and ER. Since this study is related to their research, hypothesis 2 predicts a positive relationship between creativity score and BR, AC, PE, SS and ER. Hypothesis 3. There is a negative correlation between creativity index and ER.

It is expected that participants with high ER score to perform poorly on creativity tests. N?cka and Hlawacz, (2013) concluded that there is a negative relationship between ER and creativity score. Once temperament and creativity scores have been calculated. The scores will be manually transferred into a spreadsheet. Statistical analysis will only include participants who completed both TTCT and FCB-TI tasks. IBM SPSS Statistics 25 will be used to analyze data (IBM Corp., 2017) Budget Justification Funding is required to cater for personnel costs.

The principal investigator will be paid 10 percent of their annual salary to carry out the study to its full completion. The graduate research assistant will be paid 50 percent of their yearly salary to carry out recruitment and to transfer data from the questionnaires into a spreadsheet. Each participant in this study will be compensated in monetary terms. TTCT and FCB-TI tests will be carried out in two different sessions. So, paying each participant will motivate them to attend all the sessions. TTCT materials will be obtained.