The relationship between emotional creativity and interpersonal style

This study reviewed the research literature on four aspects of creativity: processes, products, environmental influence, and personality traits. Creativity research has indicated that creativity is domain specific and that creative persons generally have a paradoxical interpersonal style. This study assumed that the reports of creative persons' paradoxical interpersonal style may have in part resulted from the fact that most studies on creativity have not appropriately specified their domains. This study selected the specific domain of emotional creativity, which is defined as the ability to experience novel emotions and to express them in ways that enhance one's personal growth and one's interpersonal relationships. In selecting the domain of emotional creativity, this study explores whether less paradoxical or more predominant interpersonal styles would emerge as characteristic of people with higher emotional creativity. Based on Rogers's and Maslow's theories of creativity, this study's working hypotheses were that (1) people with higher emotional creativity have more openness to experience in their interpersonal style and that (2) people with higher emotional creativity have more autonomy in their interpersonal style. In this study, a total of 91 undergraduate students completed three questionnaires and two take-home writing tasks. Multiple regression analysis was employed to analyze the data. The results, which reflected marginal levels of significance and small effect sizes, supported the first hypothesis but not the second hypothesis. Different relationships were found between selected components of emotional creativity and selected aspects of interpersonal style. The results suggested four general relationships between emotional creativity and interpersonal style: (1) A person who is likely to become emotionally creative is less concerned with dominating others; (2) a person who adaptively applies her or his emotional creativity perceives herself or himself as a sociable person; (3) when a person is exploring new emotions, the person encounters a basic dilemma of wanting to both communicate with and separate from others; and (4) emotionally creative persons express various degrees of social autonomy. Emotionally creative persons do not appear to have a markedly predominant interpersonal style. Future research on emotionally creative persons could further investigate whether emotionally creative persons' apparently paradoxical interpersonal style is perhaps more indicative of maladaptive instability or healthy flexibility.