Abstract, Figurative Paintings To Appreciate The Impact Of Creative Problem Solving

Recently, more and more researchers had paid full attentions on creativity. It has been the main stream to exploring creativity in a systematic and comprehensive way. Creativity thinking as the core of personal creativity, is also the most reliable and effective way so far. It has double characters, firstly it is "a new and original idea", means break with convention, divergent, imagine etc, they all belongs to intuition perceptual field; Besides it is also "thinking", so it has conception reasoning, rules, and convergent thinking, they all belongs to rational logic. Therefore creative thinking is the combination of free and logic, is also the combination of intuition perceptual and rational reasoning.The intuition perceptual of creative thinking is similar to the character of intuition in appreciation of the beauty, so there has been many studies paid attention to the relationship between creativity and appreciation (Csiksentmihalyi, J.w.eetzel,1955; Csiksentmihalyi,1988; Chen Dace,1999), Stein and Lingeman had listed72personal characters of creative man. the third item is "aesthetic", the sixth item is "interested in arts", the tenth is "versatility", the thirty ninth is "presentative", and the sixty-two is "seek for feeling", they all relevance with appreciation.So far, the empirical research between creativity and appreciation is few. Therefore this study adopt abstract and concrete famous paintings to induce the appreciation feeling of the participants, and then exploring whether the different appreciation feeling has effect on creative task, and what’s the mechanism of the effects.Study1:Collecting abstract and concrete famous paintings through the internet. We collected246famous paintings at last,118abstract paintings and128concrete paintings. All the paintings had been7-points evaluated by64college students in abstract-concrete level, beauty level, light-shade level, hedonic value, arousal level and dominance level.Study2:Exploring whether the abstract and concrete famous paintings will have effect on different creative tasks. College students were randomly assigned to two groups, the first group had to appreciate abstract famous paintings, while the second group had to appreciate concrete famous paintings. After appreciation, they all have to finish three different kinds of creative tasks, which are divergent thinking, insight problems and painting. The results shows that, the first group get a higher grades in divergent thinking (fluency) than the second group; In insight problems solving, there’s no significantly difference between the two groups; In the artistic creativity, the first group get a higher grades in the dimension of creativity level than the second group.Study3:On the basis of study1, we add emotion as another variable to explore more about how the appreciation influenced creativity. The results show that:In the divergent thinking (fluency), the main effect of appreciation feeling and emotion are all not significant, but the interactive effect of appreciation feeling and emotion is significant, which means that while appreciate the neutral emotion paintings, the first group do a better job than the second goup. But the effect disappear while appreciate the positive or negative paintings; In the insight problems, both the main effect and the interactive effect are not significant; And what is regretful, there is also no significant effect in artistic creativity.This study explored whether appreciate abstract and concrete famous paintings would influence divergent thinking, insight and artistic creativity, and if emotion worked on the effect. And we found that appreciate the neutral emotion paintings, abstract group do a better job than the concrete group, but the effect disappear while appreciate the positive or negative paintings. There’s no significant effect on insight problem solving. And the effect on artistic creativity is not stable, maybe relevance with the experiment condition.