A synergistic stress-as-enhancing and creative mindset intervention

Abstract

Stress is implicit in maturation and development, but adolescents often experience deleterious effects of unmanageable stress, impacting mental health and academics in the present, and into the future. However, stress need not be synonymous with distress, and reframing stress may improve stress management. Individuals hold opinions about their potential for growth, importance of creativity to personal identity, and creative efficacy. These creative mindsets have associations with stress, and implications for individual development. To ameliorate the harmful effects of stress, we implemented a custom-built synergistic creative mindset and stress-is-enhancing intervention, with follow-up reinforcing exposure to the same ideas. We developed a compound creative mindset scale termed the Individual Creative Inventory, built from existing scales, and enhanced with contextual elements to situate items within circumstances where growth could be actualized. This new scale was found to have a single factor structure and strong psychometric properties. Our results showed that reported stress and creative mindsets endorsement were strongly interrelated. Further, questions couched within a context of difficulty were perceived differently than similar questions without such a context. Moreover, academic versus creative tasks were found to be viewed differently and these differing views were modified by the intervention. The intervention also affected the proportion of participants electing to engage with challenging scenarios, with academic scenarios being impacted more than creative ones. These results demonstrate the robust interrelations between stress and creativity, the potential of a synergistic creative mindset and stress-is-enhancing intervention to encourage engagement with challenge more generally, and the effectiveness of repeated messaging.