Background, personality, and contextual effects on creativity

Contextual factors comprise factors aggregated for 10 Chinese regions and 52 colleges within the regions. The majority of these factors made a significant difference in the student’s creativity. Nevertheless, after the control for personal factors, only regional creativity, college creativity, college laxity, and college optimism maintained significant effects on personal creativity. Notably, the effect of college optimism on personal creativity was negative, whereas the effects of the other three contextual factors were positive. A personal factor that exerted a significant positive effect on personal creativity was surgency. By contrast, the personal factors that displayed significant negative effects on personal creativity include calmness, laxity, depression, female gender, and the year of study. After the control, Mainland China turned out to be significantly lower in creativity than Taiwan and the special administrative region.