Mindfulness Promotes Creativity?- The Different Effects Of "Observation" And "Acting With Awareness"

Mindfulness has its roots in eastern Buddhism,and is the most core skill in meditation training.Mindfulness gradually spread to the west later and was integrated with psychology therapy technique.Mindfulness training has received a greater deal of attention.Previous studies have confirmed the beneficial effects mindfulness has on emotion regulation as well as interpersonal and cognitive abilities.And several factors of the aforementioned affective and cognitive process,including positive affect,working memory capacity and cognitive flexibility are integral to driving creativity.Therefore,we speculate that mindfulness could promote creativity.But surprisingly,the relationship between mindfulness and creativity has been rarely mentioned,and the research results are not consistent.Previous researches measure creativity by different instruments,the difference between various creative compositions may cause the mixed results.Moreover,mindfulness is a complex phenomenon,composed of a set of different facets: the ability to pay attention to various stimuli(Observation),the ability to focus with full awareness(Acting with awareness),and so forth.Studies have found that the Observation and the Acting with awareness(AWA)facets of mindfulness may be differentially related to creativity.But most researches only explorer the aggregated mindfulness ignoring multiple dimensions of mindfulness.Thus,this research uses different creative tasks to study the effects of mindfulness,Observation,AWA and creativity.The research consists of two parts.Study 1 is to explore the relationship between trait mindfulness,Observation,AWA and creativity.Participants were 228 undergraduates who completed the Mindfulness Attention Awareness Scale(MAAS),the Five-Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire(FFMQ),Unusual Uses Task(UUT),Remote Association Test(RAT),Spatial insight problems,Verbal insight problems,Chinese logogriph tasks and Williams Prefer Measurement Forms(WPMF).Based on the study 1,the researcher directly manipulated either the Observation or the AWA facets of mindfulness by two different meditation trainings,and explore the causal relationship between Observation,AWA and creativity in study 2.The results showed that:1)Except for the spatial and verbal insight problem,the trait mindfulness was reliably associated with increased creativity performance(UUT,RAT,logogriphs,and WPMF);2)Observation was associated with increased RAT,WPMF-adventure,WPMF-curiosity,WPMF-ideality,WPMF-challenge ability and aggregated WPMF;while the association between AWA and creativity performance described above was negative relevant or irrelevant.That is to say,compared to AWA,Observation is more predictive power to RAT and WPMF.3)Compared to FA which improved the AWA facet of mindfulness,OM which improved the Observation facet of mindfulness is more beneficial for solving the RAT.