Emotional Creativity: A Meta-analysis and Integrative Review

ABSTRACT

Emotional creativity (EC) is a pattern of cognitive abilities and personality traits related to originality and appropriateness in emotional experience. EC has been found to be related to various constructs across different fields of psychology during the past 30 years, but a comprehensive examination of previous research is still lacking. The goal of this review is to explore the reliability of use of the Emotional Creativity Inventory (ECI) across studies, to test gender differences and to compare levels of EC in different countries. Thirty-five empirical studies focused on EC were retrieved and the coefficients required for the meta-analysis extracted. The meta-analysis revealed that women showed significantly higher EC than men (total N = 3,555). The same gender differences were also found when testing scores from three ECI subscales, i.e. emotional novelty, emotional preparedness and emotional effectiveness/authenticity. When comparing EC in 10 different countries (total N = 4,375), several cross-cultural differences were revealed. The Chinese sample showed a significantly lower average ECI total score than all the other countries. Based on the integration of results, the avenues for future research on EC and the breadth of influence of the concept of EC across different fields of psychology are discussed.

Disclosure statement

The authors attest that there are no conflicts of interest and the data reported here have not been used in any other publications.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (GA CR), project no. 18-26094S “Emotional creativity and cognitive decline in the elderly”. Many thanks to the authors who kindly provided us with missing data and to Inna Cabelkova for her help with the preparation of data processing.