It is a central assumption in creativity theory that the creativity of an idea is defined by its novelty and usefulness. The present study examined this notion by investigating how the perceived novelty and usefulness actually contribute to the overall evaluation of creativity. We collected responses to a verbal and a figural divergent thinking task in a sample of 1,500 participants. All ideas were evaluated for novelty, usefulness, or creativity by a total of 18 independent judges. Results generally indicate a greater importance of novelty than usefulness in the prediction of creativity scores. Novelty and usefulness interacted significantly in the prediction of creativity both as a linear and as a nonlinear term. An examination of the interaction between novelty and usefulness suggests that usefulness is predictive of creativity only within highly novel ideas. In conclusion, novelty can be regarded as a first-order criterion and usefulness as a second-order criterion of creativity: If an idea is not novel its usefulness does not matter much, but if an idea is novel its usefulness will additionally determine its actual creativity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)

This article introduces a new scale for the assessment of Appreciation for Creative Personality (ACP). The ACP scale is a brief 13-item forced-choice measure that assesses interindividual differences in the preference for interacting with creative people. ACP is considered an important factor of creative climate at the level of interpersonal interaction. Individuals who score high on ACP are thought to foster a creative climate in that they value creative traits in others. In two studies, the psychometric characteristics of the ACP scale were probed. The scale showed a clear unidimensional structure with evidence of good reliability and convergent, discriminant, and criterion validity. The ACP was substantially related to Big Five openness to experience, but predicted relevant criteria over and above openness, supporting the conceptual distinction between ACP and openness. In dyadic data analyses, participants’ openness to experience was significantly associated with their parents’ ACP, which shows that the ACP scale captured shared interpersonal variance. Moreover, parental ACP indirectly predicted participants’ everyday creative activities via the path of openness. These findings suggest that the ACP scale is a useful tool for the study of social-environmental climate for creativity from an interpersonal perspective.

Generational IQ test scores in the general population were observed to increase over time (i.e., the Flynn effect) across most of the 1900s. However, according to more recent reports, Flynn effect patterns have seemingly become less consistent. So far, most available evidence on this phenomenon has been categorized by drawing on the classic fluid vs. crystallized intelligence taxonomy. However, recent evidence suggests that subdomain-specific trajectories of IQ change may well be more complex. Here, we present evidence for cross-temporal changes in measurement-invariant figural reasoning tasks in three large-scale, population-representative samples of German secondary school students (total N = 19,474). Analyses revealed a consistent pattern of significant and meaningful declines in performance from 2012 to 2022. Results indicate a decrease in figural reasoning of 4.68 to 5.17 IQ points per decade (corresponding to small-to-medium effects, Cohen ds from 0.34 to 0.38). These findings may be interpreted as tentative evidence for a decreasing strength of the positive manifold of intelligence as a potential cause of the increasing number of recent reports about inconsistent IQ change trajectories.