Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T15:08:53.820Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - Creativity, personality, and musical development

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2009

David J. Hargreaves
Affiliation:
University of Leicester
Get access

Summary

Creativity is one of the most complex, mysterious, and fascinating aspects of human behaviour. It has attracted the attention of philosophers, artists, historians, and other thinkers for many years, and its complexity presents difficult, if not intractable problems to the experimental psychologist. Nevertheless, psychological studies of creativity have proliferated in recent years. A clear landmark was J.P. Guilford's Presidential Address to the American Psychological Association in 1950 on ‘Creativity’. A wealth of research has been carried out since then; the Journal of Creative Behavior was established in 1967, and is still flourishing. Early signs that the empirical study of creativity represented a ‘bandwagon’ or ‘cult’ topic, which would become yet another educational fad, were not borne out. Instead, as Freeman, Butcher and Christie (1971) pointed out, ‘It is now accepted in erudite and conservative circles: a review of the appropriate major learned journals and abstracts in education and psychology shows that a significant number of sub-sections have been established under the general heading “creativity”’ (p. 74). Two of the twelve subscales of the British ability scales (Elliott, Murray and Pearson, 1978) are designed to assess different creative abilities, which is an indication of the way in which the topic has been assimilated into the mainstream of psychology.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1986

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×