Abstract
Multicultural experience refers to those experiences gained through individuals' contact with other cultures. This study focused on exploring whether knowledge of different cultures can improve creative performance-and also how multicultural experiences influenced this performance through changes in individual's physiological mechanisms. Study 1 explored the influence of different cultural priming on creative story-writing tasks. Eighty-nine Chinese college students were randomly assigned to 4 conditions: sole American culture, dual cultures, sole Chinese culture or control condition, and made to watch 45 min slides with cultural elements—including pictures, music and videos,—and then they were asked to complete the creative story-writing task. The results showed that American culture priming group's score was significantly higher than the control condition with regards to the uniqueness and novelty of the creative story-writing task. Study 2 was aimed at exploring the relationship between physiological arousal levels induced by different cultural and creative performance. We divided the whole experiment into five stages,—including the baseline, picture, listening to music, watching video, and completing creative tasks. Through Biofeedback measurement, we recorded the physiological indexes of participants in different groups in every stage, including skin conductance, thermal, electroencephalographic, and heart rate. The results showed that contacting with foreign cultures would increase individuals' physiological arousal level and brain activity, which contributed to the following creative task.
Highlights
Creativity, which refers to the generation of useful and appropriate new ideas (Dong et al, 2016), is one of the most important capabilities of the twenty-first century (Fink et al, 2014; Miron-Spektor and Beenen, 2015)
The measurements of creativity include the cognitive process of the creativity and creative support, such as the measurement of creative performance through problem solving tasks, remote association task, story-writing task and divergent thinking tasks (Leung, 2008) Creativity depends on many factors including environment, personality, cognition and motivation and so on (Amabile, 1996; Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Sawyer, 2006; De Dreu, 2010; Chua et al, 2012, 2014)
Base on the experimental results, our study suggested that the multicultural experience did have a significant promoting effect on the creativity of the participants, since the performance in American culture priming group was better than the other groups on the whole
Summary
Creativity, which refers to the generation of useful and appropriate new ideas (Dong et al, 2016), is one of the most important capabilities of the twenty-first century (Fink et al, 2014; Miron-Spektor and Beenen, 2015). Research showed that multicultural experience would enable individuals to adopt the global processing cognitive styles in information processing (Yang and Wan, 2012; Yang, 2014). All of these studies showed that creativity was promoted to a certain extent when an individual was in one or more new cultures, and previous studies have indicated that this was most likely due to the fact that when an individual experienced a multicultural environment, the cognitive process would be changed, which might enhance individuals’ creativity
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