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Creativity

Teacher helping a student in a wheelchair paint an art project.

Creativity is the ability to produce or develop original work, theories, techniques, or thoughts. A creative individual typically displays originality, imagination, and expressiveness.

Creative thinking refers to the mental processes leading to a new invention or solution to a problem. Products of creative thinking include new machines, social ideas, scientific theories, artistic works, and more.

Adapted from the APA Dictionary of Psychology

Resources from APA

Special section: Arts-based phenomenological research can evoke rich, sensual insight into the essence of human experience

Spotlight: Special section: Arts-based phenomenological research

A special section in this APA Journals Article Spotlight in Qualitative Psychology introduces arts-based phenomenological research as an innovative methodology for doing psychological research.

How to fail successfully

Amy Edmondson, PhD, and Samuel West, PhD, talk about some of commerce’s biggest flops.

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Adam Alter, PhD, talks about why getting stuck is such a universal experience and what you can do to get stuck less often.

What psychology has to say about art

Ellen Winner, PhD, talks about how psychology can help answer the question “what is art?”

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What APA is doing

children riding on skateboards pretending they are airplanes

Divisions

Society for the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts

APA’s Division 10 is committed to interdisciplinary scholarship, both theoretical and empirical, encompassing the visual, literary, and performing arts.