Emotional Creativity, Alexithymia, and Styles of Creativity

Averill's Emotional Creativity Inventory (ECI) was correlated (n = 322) with self-report measures of creative capacity, alexithymia, fantasy proneness, and styles of creativity in everyday life. Two sets of findings suggest an overlap between the emotional and cognitive aspects of creativity: (a) a principal components analysis of the 3 ECI subscales, the creative capacity, and the fantasy proneness measures revealed 1 factor with high loading on all 5 measures; and (b) the pattern of correlations of the different creative capacity measures with styles of creativity were similar. As expected, the ECI and its subscales correlated with a measure of fantasy proneness and negatively correlated with a measure alexithymia. Earlier findings of the relationship between the measures of creative capacity, fantasy proneness, and styles of creativity were replicated and extended to the ECI.