The Language of a Creative Mind: Exploring the Relationship between Creativity and Lexical Choice

1. The Language of a Creative Mind: Exploring the Relationship between Creativity and Lexical Choice Vanella, A., Sanders, S., Nelson, B., Gyant, J., Christovich, C., Caldron, D., & Antler, M. Faculty Mentor: Whitten, S • Discussion • So, can we identify creative individuals by a unique pattern of linguistic expression? We can, but not in the ways we hypothesized. Only the hypothesis regarding cognitive process words was supported. Though not significant at the adjusted alpha, creative individuals were more likely to shift pronouns from one essay to the next. Exploratory analyses revealed that the highly creative individuals in this sample were more likely to use words indicating perceptions, especially vision. Additionally, the creative participants were more likely than low creativity participants to use future verb tense. • It is interesting that the participants categorized as highly creative wrote in a style associated with an analytic style of thinking rather than a narrative style. Those with high verbal creativity seem to be drawing the reader into their world (through words describing perceptions) which is full of nuance they are trying to understand that world (though cognitive process words) and speculating how that world will look in the future (future tense). Participants with lower verbal creativity seem to be describing objects (articles and prepositions – indicative of a formal thinking style) and people (social words, especially human words). • Issues: • Though significant, the effect sizes were incredibly small. Statistical differences were often found when with less than 1% differences between conditions. • However, small differences have been shown to be stable and predictive (Pennebaker, 2011). • Other techniques using larger writing samples have found similar results with larger effect sizes (Hirsh & Peterson, 2009). Future research will use different methods for obtaining writing samples. • Applications of this Research: • Generally, linguistic analysis may prove to be a reliable, valid, and indirect measure of creativity. • An objective and systematic understanding of creativity would impact a diversity of fields such as science, education, industry, and art. • Current scientific measures of creativity have been criticized for lacking in objectivity, depth, and predictive validity (Baer, 2011). • Has potential to separate Intelligence from creativity. Different linguistic patterns have been found by separating the 2 dimensions of Openness to Experience and Intellect (Hirsh & Peterson, 2009). Similar results were found in the present study. Purpose Methods The purpose of the present study is to explore whether or not creative individuals could be identified by a pattern of linguistic expression. • Participants: The present study included 250 undergraduate Psychology students from the University of Central Florida  The average age of participants was 21.6 with a standard deviation of 5.83, and 73.9% of the sample was female. In addition, 62.2% of the sample was Caucasian and 27.7% of participants were college freshman. • Procedure: Participants completed the study entirely online through SONA and an external survey system, SurveyMonkey. After informed consent was established, each participant completed the following tasks: • Expository Writing Prompt: Participants were asked to “write about a stressful experience you have had and how you handled it.” • Narrative Writing Prompt: Participants were asked to write a very short story. It can be on any topic you choose.” • Torrance Test of Verbal Creativity, Unusual Uses: Participants were asked to generate unusual uses for a cardboard box. • Torrance Test of Verbal Creativity, Just Suppose: Participants were asked to generate all the problems that may be associated with strings hanging from clouds down to the earth. • Personality Measure: The Five Factor Inventory, Form S, was administered upon completion of the Torrance tests. • Questionnaire: Included questions about creative hobbies, interests, and demographics. Introduction • Research has demonstrated that Creative People are • More Individualistic, even Contrary (Griffin & McDermott, 1998); Ludwig, 1995; Runco, 2004) • More Process-Oriented rather than Product-Oriented (Runco, 2004) • More Tolerant of Ambiguity (Tegano, 1990; Vernon, 1970) • More Sensitive to surroundings, perceptions, and feelings (Greenacre, 1957) • More Introverted (Feist & Barron, 1995) • More Open to Experience (Dollinger et al, 2004; George & Zhou, 2001) • Research has demonstrated a powerful relationship between sub-conscious lexical choice and personality and cognitive variables (Pennebaker, 2011) • Pronouns represent what the individual is focused on • I words represent a self focus and are used more among depressed individuals, younger people, and when people are telling the truth • You words have a distancing effect and are used when angry, or when a person with a high social status is speaking to someone with lower social status • We words are tricky – can be warm and fuzzy or a way of distancing oneself • People with a Formal thinking style tend to be more rigid and less self-reflective. This thinking style is characterized by using more articles, nouns, prepositions, numbers, and less adverbs and discrepancy words • People with an Analytic thinking style are people who seek to understand their world. This thinking style is characterized by using more cognitive-oriented words and quantifiers • People with a Narrative thinking style perceive experiences as unfolding stories. This thinking style is characterized by more conjunctions, personal pronouns, and past-tense verbs Results Essays were analyzed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software program, a program which calculates the percentage of word in a variety of categories such pronouns, cognitive process word, emotion words (Pennebaker, Francis, & Booth, 2007). After omitting participants not following directions (7), participants scoring upper and lower 25% of the Torrance Originality subscale comprise the high and low creativity groups, respectively. Eight 2 (High vs. Low creativity) X 2 (Expository vs. Narrative essay) mixed-model ANOVAs were applied to the data with LIWC results as the dependent measures. The alpha was adjusted using the Bonferroni correction to maintain a .05 Family-wise alpha. The alpha used was .006. Only the results for the Main Effect of Creativity are reported here. No interactions were found significant at the family-wise alpha level. Significant differences found between Expository and Narrative text were unenlightening. Hypotheses Highly creative participants were hypothesized to use a higher variation of pronouns, more emotion words, more adjectives, and more cognitive process words than less creative participants. * Not significant at adjusted alpha of .006