Psychological Differentiation and Mobility as Related to Creativity

Abstract

To study the relationship of psychological differentiation and creativity while taking into account the dimension of mobility and the association between differentiation and mobility, 186 male undergraduates were given the Embedded Figures Test and human figure drawings in order to assess psychological differentiation. Also, mobility, the ability to shift on demand from conventional, common modes of thought to unusual, less regulated thinking, was measured by means of word association and object sorting. The Revised Biographical Inventory and the Remote Associates Test assessed creativity. Results showed a tendency for more differentiated individuals to be more mobile. Performance on the remote associates was consistently related to the differentiation measure as predicted as were scores on human drawings. Over-all, creativity was more closely related to differentiation than was mobility. The data did not support the predicted interaction between psychological differentiation and creativity with mobility as a moderator variable.