Creative Factors and Psychotherapeutic Insight: Effects of Novelty and Appropriateness

ABSTRACT

Novelty and appropriateness have long been considered as the two fundamental elements of creativity; however, whether these two can separately affect creativity or its related processes remains unclear. In the present study, the authors focused on psychotherapeutic insight to identify the different effects of novelty and appropriateness. Three experiments were conducted (total N = 452) using a micro-counseling dialogue (MCD) paradigm, which can induce stable and differential insights by providing different types of solutions to mental distress problems (Experiment 1) and negative descriptions (Experiment 2). Further, in Experiment 3, the authors improved the study by employing a group of high school students with test anxiety (assessed using the Test Anxiety Inventory), which was more ecological. Across the three experiments, higher insightfulness and pleasantness were induced by high novelty (experiments 1 and 2) and appropriateness (experiments 1 to 3). In Experiment 3, the effect of test anxiety was found, wherein the low-test anxiety group generated higher insightfulness compared to the high-test anxiety group, and this effect was stronger in the inappropriateness condition. The results provide evidence that novelty and appropriateness are key factors in inducing psychotherapeutic insightfulness.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers 31371131); the Major Projects of the Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission (grant number D151100002315003); and the Scientific Foundation of Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (grant number E0CX151008, E0CX371008).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

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

Notes

Sensitivity analysis was conducted with G*power 3.1, and the parameters were set as follows in each analysis: alpha level 0.05, power 0.80, correlation among repeated measures 0.50. The analysis showed that our sample of three experiments was sufficient to detect a small effect of f = 0.25 (equivalent to η_p² = .06) in Experiment 1 with a sample size of 32; f = 0.18 (equivalent to η_p² = .03) in Experiment 2 with a sample size of 60; and f = 0.13 (equivalent to η_p² = .017) in Experiment 3 with a sample size of 102.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [31371131]; Scientific Foundation of Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences [E0CX151008,E0CX371008]; Major Projects of the Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission [D151100002315003].