Risorse e limiti dell'utilizzo del pensiero creativo: uno studio sulle relazioni tra creatività, autostima e ansia nella scuola primaria.

Looking at the academic literature about creativity we often find expressions such as creativity syndrome (Mumford and Gustafson, 1988) or complex creativity (Albert and Runco, 1989) that implicitly suggest the idea that creativity is a concept difficult to explain. In more recent studies some authors have attempted to create a general agreement about the definition of creativity and have identified two essential dimensions: originality and appropriateness (Runco and Jaeger, 2012). Generally we pay more attention to the dimensions of originality and novelty often ignoring the aspects of appropriateness and relevance that distinguish a creative process or product from a merely random production. The basic aspect of creative thinking is the synergy between divergent and convergent thinking in working together in sequential way for creating a new idea o product that also has a value for the context (Csikszentmihalyi, 1999). From this point of view a creative performance is not only the effect of an intrapersonal competence but also the result of a social negotiation about the validity and appropriateness of the idea or the product. If we analize the Big-C, the creativity behind the great innovators such as Newton or Picasso, the strength of this approach is obvious because of the easy identification of the importance of the social agreement about the value of their work (Kaufman and Beghetto, 2009). Although this influence it not so clear, also when we speak about little-c, everyday creativity, we should be conscious about the fact that social context evaluates the appropriateness of the creative production and could make a pressure on the creative person who has to face the dichotomy between the sense of belonging and his/her originality (Walton, 2016). Moving from this theoretical framework we decided to investigate the state of the educational system where usually the use of convergent thinking is more rewarded than the use of divergent thinking (Sternberg, 2003, 2015). Specifically, we assumed that creative children would be more exposed to the dichotomy between the inclination to produce original answers and the pressure of social context to give more convergent answers. The main aim of the study was to assess the creativity's trend during the primary school and we expected to find a negative peak for the 8 years-old children (Torrance, 1968; Darvishi e Pakdaman, 2014). A second important aspect of the research was to investigate the dimensions of anxiety and self-esteem expecting to find out that the creative children had lower levels of self-esteem and the higher levels of anxiety compared to less creative children. We assessed the variables of Creativity - Fluency, Flexibility, Originality and Elaboration - Anxiety, Self-Esteem and Fluid Intelligence. The results suggest that during the primary school, while the scores of Fluid Intelligence and Elaboration increase, the scores of Originality gradually decrease. For the second aspect of the research we detect a more stressful condition for creative children: we found a positive correlation between Originality and Anxiety (General and its subscales) and a negative correlation between Originality and Self-Esteem (General and some sub-scales). This condition was supported by the results of the ANOVAs that suggest that high levels of Anxiety are related with high scores of Originality and Fluency. These results as well as opening the way for further investigation of the relationship among creativity, anxiety and self-esteem at school, also stimulate a deeper reflection about the role that the educational system can have in fostering or inhibiting the development of creativity and promote the wellness of pupils.