Izabela Lebuda

• Ph.D.
• University of Wrocław

Researchers and educators interested in creative writing need a reliable and efficient tool to score the creativity of narratives, such as short stories. Typically, human raters manually assess narrative creativity, but such subjective scoring is limited by labor costs and rater disagreement. Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable succe...

Judging one's creativity compared to others is a complex task, which raises the question of what information people rely on when making these judgements. We studied a sample of 400 people who assessed their creativity on a percentile-type scale (0-100) relative to others (i.e., global creative self-concept; CSC), justified their judgements openly,...

The public perception of science and scientists themselves has become a much-debated topic in recent years. In this article, we contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the public’s trust in science by focussing on the practices of science, which are often not known by the public. Building on previous research by Ebersole, Axt and Nosek (2016)...

The assessment of one's own cognitive processes during creative endeavors, known as creative metacognitive monitoring (CMC-M), can manifest in various ways. These include appraising task-related operations and performance (i.e., the performance level), as well as evaluating the ideas generated (i.e., the response level). The outcomes of this evalua...

Researchers and educators interested in creative writing need a reliable and efficient tool to score the creativity of narratives, such as short stories. Typically, human raters manually assess narrative creativity, but such subjective scoring is limited by labor costs and rater disagreement. Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable succe...

The associative theory of creativity proposes that creative ideas result from connecting remotely related concepts in memory. Previous research found that higher creative individuals exhibit a more flexible organization of semantic memory, generate more uncommon word associations, and judge remote concepts as more related. In this study (N = 93), w...

While people approach creative actions in diverse ways, navigating them effectively requires self‐regulatory effort. In this preregistered experiment, we examined whether simple self‐regulation prompts, provided across the stages of the creative process, make the outcomes more creative. Participants ( N = 332) engaged in one of three creativity tas...

Does a family's economic, cultural, and social capital link to the family climate for creativity at home? To address this question, we analyze the relationship between a family's socioeconomic status and climate for creativity in the parent-child relationship and specify how the home environment mediates between these components. The data come from...

Competencies related to the evaluation of own cognitive processes, called metacognitive monitoring, are crucial as they help decide whether to persist in or desist from cognitive efforts. One of the most well-known phenomena in this context—the Dunning–Kruger effect—is that less skilled people tend to overestimate their performance. This effect has...

How are ideas born? Contrary to commonly held beliefs, creative performance, like any goal‐oriented action, requires understanding and managing one's own cognitive processes – thus, efficient metacognition. Recently, a systematic framework of creative metacognition (CMC) has been proposed, assuming the relevance of metacognitive knowledge, monitori...

Previous studies have found a negative relationship between creativity and conservatism. However, as these studies were mostly conducted on samples of homogeneous nationality, the generalizability of the effect across different cultures is unknown. We addressed this gap by conducting a study in 28 countries. Based on the notion that attitudes can b...

Previous studies have found a negative relationship between creativity and conservatism. However, as these studies were mostly conducted on samples of homogeneous nationality, the generalizability of the effect across different cultures is unknown. We addressed this gap by conducting a study in 28 countries. Based on the notion that attitudes can b...

Emotion knowledge involves the ability to recognize and express emotions and understand emotional processes. The neural substrates of emotion knowledge include i.a. the amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, and anterior cingulate cortex. These structures are also involved in processing olfactory stimuli and their volume and functional activity have been...

How are ideas born? Contrary to commonly held beliefs, creative performance, like any goal-oriented action, requires understanding and managing one's own cognitive processes – thus, efficient metacognition. Recently, a systematic framework of creative metacognition has been proposed, assuming the relevance of metacognitive knowledge, monitoring, an...

Creative ideation tasks are typically ill-defined and open-ended, and thus should benefit from metacognition efforts. However, the role of metacognitive processes – especially metacognitive control – in creative ideation appears understudied. Therefore, we conducted an online study (N = 317) investigating the relationship between divergent thinking...

Exposure to examples of varying degrees of originality may impact creative thinking differently, resulting in either a fixation or a stimulation effect. These effects can be interpreted from an associative (bottom-up) or an executive (top-down) perspective. In this preregistered study, we examined the cognitive correlates of exposing participants t...

While most people believe that creativity is malleable, some perceive it as fixed and unchangeable. What is overlooked by current theorizing is how social factors—like culture or media—influence such mindsets. This chapter focuses on how media across cultures present a perspective on the nature of abilities. We examine a specific case of the so-cal...

Creative cognition does not just involve cognitive processes in direct service of the main task objective (e.g., idea generation), but also metacognitive processes that monitor and regulate cognition adaptively (e.g., evaluation of ideas and task performance, or development and selection of task strategies). Although metacognition is vital for crea...

The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity and Emotions provides a state-of-the-art review of research on the role of emotions in creativity. This volume presents the insights and perspectives of sixty creativity scholars from thirteen countries who span multiple disciplines, including developmental, social, and personality psychology; industrial and org...

To put creative ideas and insights into action, people need to overcome obstacles, monitor their processes, and effectively evaluate the steps they take. Across two studies (N = 832 and N = 843), we explored the structure, correlates, and cross-domain similarity and specificity of creative self-regulation. Both studies supported a seven-factor mode...

Creative cognition does not just involve cognitive processes in direct service of the main task objective (e.g., idea generation), but also metacognitive processes that monitor and regulate cognition adaptively (e.g., evaluation of ideas and task performance, or development and selection of task strategies). Although metacognition is vital for crea...

Twitter has become a popular platform for sharing and discussing everyday experiences, including creativity. In this study, we explored the public conceptualization of creativity on Twitter by analyzing co-listed hashtags associated with the term #creativity in millions of tweets. Exploratory Graph Analysis was used to identify a network of semanti...

This study explores the relationship between creative activity and creative achievement with a focus on the moderating role of dispositional self-regulation. On a large sample (N = 687), we demonstrated robust links between activity and achievement but also found that these associations are moderated by self-regulation. Moreover, the relationship w...

In the interview with Gregory J. Feist, one of most prolific creativity researchers, we discuss his career, main areas of research interest, chosen research methods and share his thoughts about the future of research on creativity and effectiveness in scientific work.

Creative metacognitive monitoring represents the ability to accurately evaluate the quality of own ideas during idea generation. To the best of our knowledge, this study presents the first EEG investigation of creative metacognitive monitoring in the brain, using data, of 100 participants, who generated single, original uses of common objects (alte...

Self-report scales have become the most widely used instruments to capture people’s self-perception of creativity. Previous studies, however, provided only a limited insight into the psychometric properties of such measures. This paper reports an extensive item response theory (IRT) analysis of the Short Scale of Creative Self (SSCS): one of the mo...

In the interview with Sandra Russ, one of most prolific creativity researchers, we discuss her career, main areas of research interest, chosen research methods and share her thoughts about the future of research on creativity and effectiveness in scientific work.

With the media’s omnipresence, beneficial and detrimental effects on human behavior—including creativity—are being widely discussed. This essay presents potential benefits of passive and active media use for enhancing creative thinking and behavior. Based on the classic socio-cognitive theory of observational learning and stressing the importance o...

With the media’s omnipresence, beneficial and detrimental effects on human behavior – including creativity – are being widely discussed. This essay discusses potential benefits of passive and active media use for the development of creativity. Based on the classic socio-cognitive theory of observational learning, and stressing the importance of cre...

Is it possible to strengthen students’ engagement in creative activities using simple everyday tasks focused on creative thinking, self-efficacy, or valuing creativity? The present article addresses this question in a daily-diary investigation on first-year university students. During 8 days, students were presented with simple tasks that required...

This study explores how adolescents regulate their activity while working on creative projects. A large sample (N = 739) of Polish adolescents reported on their most creative, complex project conducted within the last year and answered retrospectively framed self-regulation items related to this specific activity. Exploratory and confirmatory facto...

Who would feel confident being constantly evaluated? How do artists or scientists embrace the uncertainty linked to their work’s social validation? In the first part of the chapter, I present meanders related to the inevitable evaluation process of professional and eminent creators. Then, I propose a theoretical model of how creators tame the uncer...

In the interview with Roni Reiter-Palmon, one of most prolific creativity researchers, we discuss her career, main areas of research interest, chosen research methods and share her thoughts about the future of research on creativity and effectiveness in scientific work.

Myths about creativity keep contributing to its mysterious aura despite our increasing scientific understanding of this complex phenomenon. This study examined the prevalence of known creativity myths across six countries from diverse cultural backgrounds and explored why some people believe in them more than others. Results revealed persistent, wi...

Which factors drive creative activity and achievement? Here, we explore this question with a special focus on both core, to a large extent biologically rooted (e.g., personality, intelligence), and surface, more malleable and socio-culturally conditioned (e.g., creative self-concept), predictors of real-life creativity. Using a series of multivaria...

Although personality is vital for creative achievement, little is known about the personality profiles of eminent creators from different domains. The role personality plays in being recognized and acclaimed by public opinion is even more overlooked. In our study, we performed linguistic analyses of postaward interviews on a large sample (N = 225)...

This article investigates how Big Five personality traits are related to creative achievements and lawbreaking behavior in a large sample (N = 1669) of Polish adults. Structural equation modelling with personality modelled as a bi-factor structure demonstrated a weak, yet significant link (r = .21) between latent factors of creative achievements an...

Creativity is agentic, and so is learning. People create and learn new things most effectively when they are convinced that they can respond appropriately to the task (creative confidence) and value the activity at hand. This investigation explores the role of the relatively understudied aspect of creative agency: self-regulatory strategies. In a l...

This paper presents a meta-analysis of the relationships between creativity (creative potential, activities, and achievement) and the Dark Triad of personality: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Multilevel meta-analytic models demonstrated a small but significant positive association between creativity and narcissism (r = .15 [.10, .29...

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is influencing our lives in an enormous and unprecedented way. Here, we explore COVID-19-lockdown's consequences for creative activity. To this end, we relied on two extensive diary studies. The first, held on March 2019 (pre-pandemic), involved 78 students who reported their emotions and creativity...

This study provides an empirical test of the relationship between creative potential, mating, and reproductive success in a sample using natural methods of fertility control: the Meru tribe living in the regions of Laare and Mutuati in Kenya. The participants (N = 133; 65 females) solved a figural creativity test (the Test of Creative Thinking – Dr...

In order to gain an insight into scholars’ concerns emerging from the COVID-19 crisis, we asked scientists from all over the world about their attitudes and predictions regarding the repercussions of this current crisis on academia. Our data showed that the academic world was placed in an unprecedented situation. Results further showed that everybo...

Family rules, routines, and resources shape children's creativity. However, little is known about how parents' creative self-concepts and creative activity are related to the lifestyle adults create in their families. Family lifestyle might be operationalized as referring to domain-general dimensions of family social functioning (cohesion, flexibil...

In the interview with Mark Runco, one of most prolific creativity researchers, we discuss his career, main areas of research interest, chosen research methods and share his thoughts about the future of research on creativity and effectiveness in scientific work.

This study investigates the link between mother’s and children’s (8 to 9 years of age) creative thinking, focusing in particular on how mothers’ creativity interacts with climate for creativity in the parent-child relationship in predicting the offspring’s creative potential assessed by the Test for Creative Thinking-Drawing Production (TCT-DP). Th...

This study explores how adolescents regulate their activity while working on creative projects. A large sample (N = 739) of Polish adolescents reported on their most creative, complex project conducted within the last year and answered retrospectively framed self-regulation items related to this specific activity. Exploratory and confirmatory facto...

Family rules, routines, and resources shape children’s creativity. However, little is known about how parents’ creative self-beliefs and creative activity are related to the lifestyle adults create in their families. Family lifestyle might be operationalized as referring to domain-general dimensions of family functioning (cohesion, flexibility, com...

This study examines the relationship between parents’ and their adolescent children’s creative mindsets. In a large sample of parent–child dyads (N > 1,100 dyads), we found that perceiving creativity as possible to be developed (growth mindset) versus stable (fixed mindset) shows significant similarity. There was a moderately strong latent correlat...

The current COVID-19 pandemic is influencing our lives in an enormous and unprecedented way. Yet while this impact is being intensively studied with regard to a broad range of health, social, and psychological aspects, the effects of COVID-19 for creativity have been overlooked. Here, we explore COVID-19-lockdown’s consequences for creative activit...

Pathogen threat can translate into a willingness to distance oneself from others on a psychological level. Building on this notion, we predicted that the ongoing coronavirus pandemic can affect attitudes toward foreign nationalities. We explored the intergroup consequences of the current epidemiological situation in two studies involving a total of...

We present a brief opinion piece on the potential effects of the coronavirus pandemic on academia. Over 700 academics from around the world were surveyed, which allowed to identify their main concerns: from low-level, like decreased ability to run experiments, complete grants, conference cancellations, to broader, like job stability and income secu...

The recent coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic forms an enormous challenge for the world's economy, governments, and societies. Drawing upon the Parasite Model of Democratization (Thornhill, R., Fincher, C. L., & Aran, D. (2009), parasites, democratization, and the liberalization of values across contemporary countries, Biological Reviews, 84(1), 113-1...

Pathogen threat can translate into willingness to distance oneself from others also on a psychological level. Building on this notion, we predicted that the ongoing pandemic of Coronavirus can affect attitudes toward foreign nationalities. We explored the inter-group consequences of the current epidemiological situation in two studies involving a t...

For decades, creativity scholars have been interested in exploring the relationship between creativity and learning. Much of the empirical work in this area has focused on examining correlational links between domain general outcomes of creativity tests and results in school achievement tests. The results of such work have been somewhat variable, b...

Drawing upon the Parasite Model of Democratization across two preregistered experiments conducted in the USA and Poland (total N = 1237), we examined the psychological and political consequences of the recent COVID-19 pandemic. By manipulating saliency of COVID-19, we found that activating thinking about coronavirus may elevate Americans' and Poles...

In the interview with Robert J. Sternberg, one of most prolific creativity researchers, we discuss his career, main areas of research interest, chosen research methods and share his thoughts about the future of research on creativity and effectiveness in scientific work.

Este manifiesto, discutido por 20 académicos y académicas que representan diversas líneas de investigación sobre la creatividad, marca un cambio conceptual dentro de los estudios de este campo. Los enfoques socioculturales han hecho contribuciones sustanciales al concepto de creatividad en las últimas décadas y hoy pueden proporcionar un conjunto d...

In the interview with Dean Keith Simonton, one of most prolific creativity researchers, we discuss his career, main areas of research interest, chosen research methods and share his thoughts about the future of research on creativity and effectiveness in scientific work.

People differ in how they define creativity. Some people see it as malleable and possible to be developed (so-called growth mindset). Others view creativity as a stable and largely unchangeable characteristic (fixed mindset). In this article, we explore whether and to what extent creative mindsets change when everyday (little-c) or eminent (Big-C)...

This Handbook brings together an international cast of experts to explore the social nature and context of creativity studies, focusing on methodology as a key component in advancing the social study of creativity. Two decades on from the pioneering work of Alfonso Montuori and Ronald E. Purser, the authors present a timely appraisal of past and pr...

This exploratory study aims at integrating the psychometric approach to studying creativity with an eye-tracking methodology and thinking-aloud protocols to potentially untangle the nuances of the creative process. Wearing eye-tracking glasses, one hundred adults solved a drawing creativity test – The Test of Creative Thinking-Drawing Production (T...

This paper presents the Short Scale of Creative Self (SSCS) – an instrument to measure trait-like creative self-efficacy and creative personal identity: characteristics of growing importance in creativity literature. Study 1 (N = 1,582) confirmed the assumed factor structure of the SSCS as well as high internal consistency of both sub-scales. Study...

The aim of the article was to investigate how the family life of highly creative individuals—mainly marriages or romantic relationships—is related to their sense of success and well‐being. Previous studies have led to conflicting conclusions. The predominant finding has been that marriage and family constitute an obstacle to creative potential deve...

Background This longitudinal study examines the extent to which personal factors (intelligence and health status), social resources (family socioeconomic status, SES), special school placement and being labelled as a pupil with a disability in childhood predict subjective quality of life and objective life success 23 years later. Materials and Met...

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is one of the most eminent psychologists of the modern era. His ideas, such as flow, or the systems model of creativity, have inspired numerous studies, theoretical analyses as well as pedagogic and psychological interventions. Alongside Martin Seligman, he founded positive psychology and continues to work to promote it. In...

Parents’ attitudes, behaviors, and traits are significant predictors of their children's creative ability. Not much is known, however, about intentional actions taken by parents to develop and support children's creativity. Based on a literature review and a pilot study (Authors, 2017) we have formulated four factors that make up the climate for cr...

poster

This paper explores longitudinal links between intelligence measured at age 11 (N = 1594) and 13 (N = 255) and creative achievement as tested forty years later (at age 52). Using a dataset from the most recent (fifth: 2015) follow-up to the Warsaw Study (Firkowska et al., 1978), we examined the hypothesis that intelligence forms a necessary-yet-not...

Two studies examined the dynamics and predictors of momentary creative activity among adults. Study 1 (N = 74) applied the experience sampling methodology (ESM) to investigate the likelihood of engaging in creative activity and explain its variability using both within-person predictors (experienced emotions) and between person-predictors (personal...

The purpose of the chapter is to investigate the development of eminent creators’ self-concept. Our qualitative analysis is based on two sources of data: interviews with eminent creators from the USA recorded years ago [Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity. Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. New York, NY: Harper Collins; N = 92]...

We raise two issues in the article at hand: how women who are mothers fulfil their creative needs, and what significance they ascribe to creativity in their role as mothers. A thematic analysis of structured interviews with twenty-seven women suggests that for mothers, creative activity mostly concerns fulfilling one’s responsibilities as part of t...

In the historiometric case study described in the chapter, a nomothetic and idiographic approach was described, thus creating a unique possibilities of research into outstanding creativity. Previously, pedagogy and psychology noted few publications that would apply this not so common technique. Thus, an attempt was made to describe the main histori...

e article describes the relationship between the perception of the professional educators’ workloads among general, integrated, and special school teachers and their assessment of organizational climate in the school. e professional educators’ workloads are: organizational workloads, con- icts, and lack of sense of work. e speci cs of work organiza...

In this editorial we discuss the reasons behind choosing social interactions as the theme for this CTRA special issue. We briefly describe the transition in creativity research from a paradigm centered on the individual and his/her intra-psychological predispositions to one focused on the social, systemic approach to creativity in which this phenom...

As individual subjects, creativity and personality have been the focus of much research and many publications. This Cambridge Handbook is the first to bring together these two topics and explores how personality and behavior affects creativity. Contributors from around the globe present cutting-edge research about how personality traits and motives...

Is it possible to be creatively successful in many domains? In this chapter, we explore this question and discuss potential mechanisms of cross-domain creativity (CDC). To this end, we start with defining CDC, present its hypothetical trajectories in development, and explore the role of domain-general creative potential for CDC. We pay special atte...

We decided to investigate networks between the nominators and nominees for the Nobel Prize, compare the structure in domains representing science and arts, check the differences in each network between laureates and the remaining nominees, and, in the case of nominators, we paid attention to persons, who have successfully nominated a winner (i.e. t...

The aim of this study is the analysis of creativity changes across life, particularly the widely discussed crisis periods in the development of creative abilities. A large and diversified sample of Poles (N = 4898 aged from 4 to 21 years), at each educational stage of the Polish education system, from pre-schoolers, through primary school students,...

This study examined the relationship between facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR), an established marker of testosterone level and dominance, and eminent writers’ achievement. The fWHR of laureates (N = 39) and nominees (N = 247) of the Nobel Prize in Literature 1901–1950 was measured together with historiometric data. It was demonstrated that altho...

The relation between political pathology and creative activity has been explored in a large body of research. Little is known, however, about eminent creators’ experience in a closed country with a nondiversified source of power. In this chapter, I provide a synthesis of existing research on the relationship between creativity and the political con...

This article reports a meta-analysis of the relationships between creative self-beliefs (CSBs)-a broad set of characteristics including creative self-efficacy, creative personal identity, and self-rated creativity-and the Big Five (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) as well as the Huge Two (plasticity and sta...

Mindfulness improves people’s functioning in many areas, but its relationship with creativity is equivocal. To assess the link between mindfulness and creativity, this paper presents a multilevel meta-analysis of 89 correlations obtained from 20 samples published between 1977 and 2015 and demonstrates a statistically significant correlation of medi...

This study examined the relationship between prenatal testosterone exposure assessed by second-to-fourth digit ratio (2D:4D) and the eminence of Polish actors. The eminence of almost one hundred (N = 98) famous Polish male and female actors whose hand prints were in a hall of fame in Miedzyzdroje, Poland was assessed by independent judges; data on...