Running head: TIME CONSTRAINT AND CREATIVITY 1 The effect of time constraint awareness on creativity test performance University of British Columbia Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Psychology Department, The University of British Columbia, 2136 West Mall, Vancouver British Columbia, V6T 1Z4, Canada. Email:
TIME CONSTRAINT AND CREATIVITY 2 Abstract Our perception of time is often a subjective dimension of our conscious awareness which varies across context and situational demands. It can be influenced by our internal psychological state and similarly, our creative potential can be affected by the interplay of our perception, mood, and situational factors. Our study aims to examine how participants' creativity can be limited or enhanced by their perception of time constraint introduced or unspecified as assessed by a simple form of Wallach-Kogan Creativity Test (WKCT). It is hypothesized that a pressure-inducing time constraint awareness condition would decrease the quality of participants' creativity test performance by demanding greater attentional resource and increasing test anxiety levels through a prevention-focused motivation. In contrast, the absence of pressure when a time constraint is unspecified would likely result in increased creativity through promotion-focused motivation by decreasing negative affect and anxiety level, which consequently enhances creativity. The results showed a small difference in test scores between participants in both informed and uninformed time constraint conditions with the former group performing better than the latter. It is interpreted that limitations in the study's design and the factor of anxiety could provide a beneficial motivation for enhancing creativity performance.
TIME CONSTRAINT AND CREATIVITY 3 Time Constraint Awareness and Creativity In an age when the complaint of insufficient time to complete one's tasks has become an all too common part of our conversations, the need and want for time is now perceived to be more important than it used to be in centuries past. Our perception of time is therefore closely associated with how we are gauging our ability and potential to succeed in our academic and career performance. It is also a vulnerable and flexible component of our conscious awareness that is subject to internal and external influences. In turn, time perception also impacts our attention, cognition and emotion. Past research shows that the allocation of one's attention to simultaneously process the passage of time and perform a time-unrelated task can distort judgement of the duration of time (Brown, 1fi85). Numerous studies have reported that the more cognitively demanding a nontemporal task is, the shorter the duration of time is perceived. This is likely to lead to a prevention orientation whereby one is focused on the anxiety-inducing avoidance of unnecessarily wasting further time on the current task. A study by Friedman & Förster (2001) examined the opposing effects of prevention and promotion cues in negatively and positively affecting participants' creativity respectively. This is based on Higgins' theory of two distinct motivational orientations of prevention and promotion focus (Higgins, 1fififf). A prevention- focused orientation motivates one to attain security from a negative consequence such as failure. On the other hand, promotion focus