Ep.115. More Word Associations, More Creativity?

"Revisiting Mednick’s (1962) Theory of Creativity with a Composite Measure of Creativity: The Effect of Stimulus Type on Word Association Production" by Deana Vitrano, Jeanette Altarriba and Deniz Leblebici-BasarSummaryThis paper revisits Mednick's theory of creativity, which posits that more creative individuals generate a greater number of word associations. The study investigated this by using controlled lists of abstract and concrete, high and low-frequency words to assess word association productivity in participants categorized as highly creative or less creative based on a composite measure including several different creativity tasks. While supporting Mednick's core idea that highly creative people produce more associations overall, the research also found that high-frequency words prompted more responses than low-frequency words, but, contrary to some previous work, there was no difference in responses between abstract and concrete words. Furthermore, the study found no significant link between creativity levels and intelligence or verbal fluency using their chosen measures.