The Nature of Human Creativity

This book provides an overview of the approaches of leading scholars to understanding the nature of creativity, its measurement, its investigation, its development, and its importance to society. The authors are the twenty-four psychological scientists who are most frequently cited in the four major textbooks on creativity, and they can thus be considered among the most eminent living scholars in the field. Authors discuss how they define creativity, the kinds of questions they have addressed, theories they have proposed, and a description of their research and the most interesting empirical results it has produced. The chapters represent a wide range of substantive and methodological emphases, including psychometric, cognitive, expertise-based, developmental, neuropsychological, cultural, systems, and group-difference approaches. The Nature of Human Creativity brings together an incredible diversity of viewpoints, helping students and researchers to see the points of consensus as well as the differences in contemporary perspectives.

Robert J. Sternberg, Ph.D., is Professor of Human Development at Cornell and Honorary Professor of Psychology at the University of Heidelberg. Formerly he was IBM Professor of Psychology and Education at Yale. He has won both the William James and James McKeen Cattell Awards from the Association for Psychological Science as well as more than two dozen other major awards, and is a member of the National Academy of Education and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is past-president of the American Psychological Association and the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. He is among the most cited psychologists in the world, with roughly 139,000 citations and an h index of 182.

James C. Kaufman, Ph.D., is a Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Connecticut. He is the author or editor of more than 40 books, including Creativity 101 (2nd Edition, 2016) and The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity (with Robert Sternberg; Cambridge, 2010). He has published more than 300 papers, including the 'Four-C Model of Creativity' (with Ron Beghetto) and the study that spawned the 'Sylvia Plath Effect'. He is a past president of Division 10 (Society for Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts) of the APA and is the president-elect of the American Creativity Association. James has won many awards, including Mensa's research award, the Torrance Award from the National Association for Gifted Children, and APA's Berlyne, Arnheim, and Farnsworth awards. He co-founded two major journals (Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts and Psychology of Popular Media Culture) and currently co-edits the International Journal of Creativity and Problem Solving.