Personality, cognitive skills, and creativity in different life domains

A preliminary, effort was made to integrate personality and cognitive-skill approaches to understanding the sources of creativity. It was proposed tha t personality and cognitive skill each have differential predictive power f or different types (i.e., domains) of creativity. Further; it M,as proposed that cognitive skills at least partially mediate personality effects on cr eativity and that personality and cognitive skills mall interact to shape c reativity. Both personality and divergent thinking measures were used to pr edict 3 types of creativity-problem solving, artistic, and social-among 41 students in a creativity course. Results of bivariate correlational, analys is of variance, and regression analyses provided some support for the ideas that (a) different types of creativity are somewhat independent of each ot her, (b) personality and divergent thinking have somewhat different relatio ns to creativity of different types, (c) originality of thinking partially mediates the relations of personality to creativity in different domains, a nd (d) personality and divergent thinking have some interactive, as well as some main effect, impacts on creativity.