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A Review of Experimental Research on Embodied Creativity: Revisiting the Mind–Body Connection
Author(s) -
Frith Emily,
Miller Stephanie,
Loprinzi Paul D.
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
the journal of creative behavior
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.896
H-Index - 55
eISSN - 2162-6057
pISSN - 0022-0175
DOI - 10.1002/jocb.406
Subject(s) - embodied cognition , creativity , psychology , context (archaeology) , variety (cybernetics) , embodied agent , selection (genetic algorithm) , cognitive psychology , cognitive science , social psychology , computer science , artificial intelligence , paleontology , biology
A growing body of experimental work highlights the potential value of unstructured, interactive, or spontaneous motions, including gestures, dance, shifting body postures, physical object‐manipulation, drawing, etc. to favorably impact creative performance. However, despite these favorable findings, to our knowledge, no systematic review has been conducted to explore the totality of evidence for embodied activities in this arena. Thus, the objective of this paper was to systematically evaluate the potential effects of embodied experimental manipulations on traditionally assessed creativity outcomes. A systematic review was conducted utilizing PubMed, PsychInfo, Sports Discus, and Google Scholar databases. The 20 studies evaluated employed a variety of methodological approaches regarding study design, embodied manipulation, and selection of specific creativity outcomes. Despite these variations, embodied movement robustly enhanced creativity across nearly all studies (90%), with no studies showing a detrimental effect. Based on the evaluation of the studies reviewed, several common themes emerged. These included the relevance of symbolic metaphors and distributed embodied cognitions, selection of embodied modality, specific measurement considerations, as well as the importance for implementing true, inactive control conditions in embodied creativity research. This review expands on these findings and places them in the context of improving future embodied creativity research.