Impact Of Fear Of Evaluation On Creativity—intervention Of Expressive Writing

Creativity is such a special mentality that uniquely belongs to human beings,is characterized by the formation of something that is both novel and useful.Creativity requires not only to produce creative ideas or products,but also to accept the evaluations and choices from others in the real social world.Previous studies have explored the impact of evaluation as an external stimulus and the emotions the evaluation arises on creativity,but have not explored the influence of individual attitudes toward evaluation on creativity from the perspective of the inventive subjectivity.Fear of evaluation is a conception that involves the individual's attitude and feelings towards evaluation,including fear of positive evaluation(FPE)and fear of negative evaluation(FNE).It is a typical evaluation anxiety,which is very common in both western and eastern countries,also at different ages.Investigating the relationship between fear of evaluation and creativity is conducive to deepening the understanding of the relationship between evaluation and creativity,and exploring ways to improve or stimulate creativity in real evaluative situations in which people often feel anxious and worried.It has essential theoretical sense and practical value In the field of research on creativity.To this end,this research focuses on the following issues: First,explore the impact of fear of evaluation on individual creativity on a relatively stable level of trait.Second,at the state level,evaluate the impact of fear of evaluation on individual creativity in an evaluative experimental situation.Finally,explore the reason of the impact fear of evaluation has on creativity,and further explore ways to protect creativity in an evaluative situation.In order to solve the above problems,three studies were designed.Study 1: To use a questionnaire survey method to investigate the influence of FPE and FNE on individual creativity tendency at the trait level,and figure out the relationship between fear of positive evaluation and fear of negative evaluation,to provide the basis for further behavioral experimental research.Study 2: To design a behavioral experiment to examine the difference in creativity of each type of fear of evaluation,under different evaluation pressures.Study 3: On the basis of Study 2,to design a behavioral experiment to explore the reasons for the impact of fear of evaluation on creativity under evaluation pressure,and find ways to enhance creativity.This study finds that the evaluation of fear has a negative impact on the creativity tendency at the trait level and the individual creativity at the state level.(1)FNE has a negative impact on an individual's creative,and FPE has a negative impact on the challenge dimensions of creativity.FPE plays a partial intermediary role in the negative impact of FNE on challenge.(2)According to the different levels of FPE and FNE in each individual,the evaluation fear is divided into three types: both-low type,that is,they do not feel worried about positive evaluation and negative evaluation;high-FNE-only type,that is,consider themselves worried about negative evaluation,but not worried about positive evaluation;both-high type,consider themselves are both worried about negative evaluation and worried about positive evaluation.high-FNE-only type and both-high type individuals have lower levels of creativity than both-low type.(3)At the state level,the evaluation of fear also has a negative impact on creativity: the both-low type individuals has no decline in creativity in both positive and negative evaluative pressure;the high-FNE-only individuals have a lower level of creativity under two kinds of evaluative pressure.For the high-FNE-only type,the creativity has declined more under the negative evaluation pressure compared with the positive evaluation pressure;for the both-high type,the creativity has shown the same degree of decrease under the pressure of positive/negative evaluation.(4)The negative impact of fear of evaluation is in some degree due to cognitive mechanism——the attention distraction in the evaluative pressure situation.Both fear of negative evaluation and fear of positive evaluation would cause attention distraction when individuals in face of an evaluative situation,therefore they are not able to focus their attention on the creativity task at hand which leads to a lower creative performance compared to the situation under no evaluative pressure.(5)Expressive writing is an effective way to suppress the negative impact of fear of evaluation on creativity.It can avoid the attention distraction and enable individuals to focus on the attention resources to the task of creativity,thereby improving the performance of creativity task.Although this study has made some meaningful new discoveries,there are still some shortcomings in the research process.First,the sample selection is limited to college students,and it is difficult to extend the conclusion to other groups.Second,the study of the three experimental groups is limited to the subjects.Due to the actual difficulty in experiment participants recruitment,study 3 does not include all types of evaluation fear individuals.Third,the measurement method for attention distraction is subjective,and the measurement method for creativity is relatively simple.In addition to avoiding the above shortcomings,future research can also start from the following aspects:(1)using varied creative task to explore the relationship between fear and creativity;(2)examining the relationship of fear of evaluation and creativity from the perspective of creative motivation;(3)considering the way of longitudinal research to explore the impact of fear of evaluation on creativity;(4)since the research found that there is a significant positive correlation between the fear of positive evaluation and the imaginative dimension of creativity,the future study can try to explore the relationship between imagination and fear of evaluation.