The relationship of different aspects of creativity with anxiety and hostility in adolescents

The article focuses on the relationship between creativity and the characteristics that are often attributed to creative people: anxiety, hostility and a specific choice of coping strategies. There is significant inconsistency in the results obtained in different studies. The article attempts to link separate aspects of creativity with anxiety, hostility and coping strategies in adolescents. The study involved 158 children (12.9 ± 0.7 years old) — school students of grades 6–7. The methods included the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (adapted by E. I. Shcheblanov) to assess creativity, the Coping Strategy Indicator by D. Amirkhan (adapted by N. A. Sirota and V. M. Yaltonsky) to describe coping strategies, the Buss—Durkee Hostility Inventory (adapted by A. A. Khvan) to describe hostility and its dimensions, and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory by Ch. D. Spielberger (adapted by Yu. L. Khanin) to measure anxiety. The SPSS software package was used for data processing. For the entire sample, the factor analysis found that the creativity aspect ‘fluency’ is associated with ‘guilt’ and ‘trait anxiety’. The creativity aspects ‘originality’ and ‘elaboration’ showed no association with any of the studied parameters. The aspect ‘flexibility’ is associated with the coping strategy ‘seeking social support’. Further, we separately considered groups of children with different levels of creativity. To this end, the children were divided into two groups based on their overall creativity scores: those above the average and those below it. The analysis of the results separately for children with different levels of creativity showed that in more creative children, the aspects of creativity are more associated with anxiety, while in children with less pronounced creativity they are associated with hostility. Thus, the difference in the results in different studies may be due to the fact that different aspects of creativity are not equally associated with hostility and anxiety. The creativity aspects ‘originality’ and ‘elaboration’ are associated with neither hostility nor anxiety. Further, the associations of creativity aspects with hostility and anxiety are different in children with different levels of overall creativity.