The Measure Of Creativity Anxiety And Its Brain Functional Basis

Creativity is the source of society improvement.The ability to think creatively is highly prized across a variety of fields,and an individual’s ability to maximizing their creative potential only promises to become a more critical determinant of success as creativity emerges as the area of human cognition least replaceable by artificial intelligence.Previous findings have demonstrated that creativity anxiety exists in various domains,from the domains that are popularly thought of as creative(e.g.,visual arts,dance)to the domains that are not(e.g.,science,mathematics).The creativity anxiety could have an important impact on what kinds of careers and majors people pursue.Early explorations on the relationship between creativity and anxiety mostly focused on the influence of trait anxiety or state anxiety on creativity.There is no consistent conclusion about the relationship between creativity and anxiety.Some researchers hold that anxiety narrows the scope of attention,consumes cognitive resources,and thus inhibits creativity.And some researches found that anxiety can promote creative thinking.The existing research regards anxiety and creativity as two separate concepts However,anxiety is generally accompanied by the cognitive process of creativity.Individual’s anxiety toward creative thinking may be a limiting factor of creative achievement.According to the “standard definition” of creativity: a form of cognition that results in the generation of novel and valuable output,broadly construed(Runco & Jaeger,2012),Daker and colleagues(2019)developed the Creativity Anxiety Scale(CAS).They create two types of items: creativity anxiety(CA)items,intended to measure anxiety toward situations that require being creative,and non-creativity anxiety control(NAC)items,intended to measure anxiety toward the noncreative demands of the situations presented in the CA items.Darker et al.(2019)found that,on average(and especially among women),anxiety was greater for situations thatrequire creativity than noncreative situations with similar demands.They also found that individual creativity anxiety significant negatively predict creative achievement,which suggested that creativity anxiety might be a potential barrier to individual creative achievement.Somewhat surprisingly,however,the CAS has not been revised or applied in other countries.Although everyone may experience creativity anxiety,not everyone can experience the same level of creativity anxiety.Gender differences observed in the Daker’s study intriguingly suggest that creativity anxiety may help explain the so called “leaky STEM pipeline” along which women drop out of STEM pursuits at each stage of career advancement.The brain plays an important role in emergence and change of individual creativity anxiety.In recent years,with the development and maturity of neuroimaging technique,more and more researchers are beginning to examine the neural correlates of creativity.Existing researches have shown that creativity is closely related to the structure and function of default network,executive control network and salience network.However,the individual differences of creativity anxiety and its neural basis have never been explored.Therefore,the present study aims to revise CAS in Chinese version,and for the first time to explore the neural basis of individual creativity anxiety.Study 1: the Chinese version of CAS(Daker et al.,2019)was revised for the first.First,16 items of CAS were translated to Chinese to form a preliminary revised scale.This preliminary revised scale was tested in a sample size of 257(Dataset 1).We performed the exploratory factor analysis,reliability and validity analysis.The results showed that the reliability and validity of were in line with the standards.After examining the rotated factor loadings,two CA items were found to have factor loadings that were substantially lower than factor loadings from the original scale(Daker et al.,2019),and as such two CA items and their paired NAC items were dropped from analysis.Second,the revised scale was tested in a sample size of 175(Dataset 2).We performed reliability and validity analysis,and confirmatory factor analysis.The results showed that the reliability and validity of the Chinese version of CAS were in line with the standards,and the results of confirmatory factor analysis showed that it was in line with the fitness standard of the overall model.Study 2: we employed a machine-learning technique for exploring relations between functional connectivity and behavior(connectome-based predictive modeling;CPM)to investigate the functional connections underlying creativity anxiety.Using whole-brainresting-state functional connectivity data,we identified a network of connections or “edges” that predicted individual differences in creativity anxiety,largely comprising connections within and between regions of the executive and default networks and the limbic system.We then found that the edges related to creativity anxiety identified in one sample generalize to predict creativity anxiety in an independent sample.We additionally found evidence that the network of edges related to creativity anxiety were largely distinct from those found in previous work to be related to divergent creative ability(Beaty et al.,2018).In Dataset 2,we found creativity anxiety scores negatively predicted individual differences in creative achievement,which may suggest that creativity anxiety might be a potential barrier to the development of individual creative achievement.Taken together,after developing a Chinese language version of the Creativity Anxiety Scale and replicating key behavioral findings on creativity anxiety,we conducted the first investigation into the neural correlates of creativity anxiety by performing connectome-based predictive modeling of resting state fMRI data to predict individual differences in creativity anxiety.A network of whole-brain functional connections that predicted individual differences in creativity anxiety-comprised largely of areas within executive,salience,and default mode networks and in limbic and subcortical regions-was identified.The profile of functional connections related to creativity anxiety in one sample was found to predict individual differences in creativity in an independent sample,demonstrating the replicability of these findings.Moreover,the functional connections relating to creativity anxiety were found to be largely distinct from those that previous research identified as relating to divergent creative ability(Beaty et al.,2018),demonstrating the specificity of our results.As in the case of math anxiety,insights about creativity anxiety at the neural level have potential to inform the development of intervention strategies.