Abstract
Everyday experience suggests that there are individuals who are “glib,” who are “quick-witted,” and who can “think on their feet.” This ability to formulate fluent, novel messages has been termed creative facility, and previous research has identified various personality trait and information processing correlates of the phenomenon. The aim of this study was to ascertain whether formative communication experiences (i.e., family communication patterns) might be related to creative facility in a sample of young adults. The results indicated that people reporting a high family conformity orientation tended to be less fluent in formulating simple novel narratives and, further, that this effect was heightened under more cognitively demanding encoding conditions. Family conversation orientation did not have an effect on message fluency.
Notes
Notes
Four additional subjects were excluded from the data analysis because they were not native English speakers, and, following standard practice in dealing with timed responses (see Bargh & Chartrand, Citation2000), two other participants were dropped from the analysis because their mean message production time for one or more of the three trial types was more than three standard deviations above the mean. Problems with the audio recordings for two additional subjects precluded analysis of their narrative production time data.
As a parallel, consider the decades-long research effort devoted to unraveling the mechanisms that give rise to communication apprehension, a similarly intuitively resonant message production phenomenon.