Gains and Losses in Creative Personality: A Lifespan Developmental Approach

The study adopted a lifespan developmental model to investigate the subjective perceptions of creative personality traits in young, middle-aged and older adults. Participants included 1,148 participants from 4 age groups: 681 emerging adults (aged 18 to 25), 171 young adults (aged 26 to 40), 56 middle-aged working adults (aged 41 to 60), and 240 older adults (aged 61 or above) all living in the community. It also examined the desirability and age-sensitive changes in terms of onset and closing age of creative personality traits. Age-related differences were found in the perception of development gains and losses as well as creative personality traits. Older adults perceived that more gains in desirable creative personality traits increased with age and undesirable traits decreased with age than the young and middle-aged adults. The young adults believed that desirable gains began at 20 and ceased at 60 but the older adults believed that the closing age could be extended to 80. The older adults also rated significantly higher in self-perceived creativity than the other two age groups. Unlike the findings in Western studies, personal attributes, including affected, cautious, conventional, honest, well-mannered, and sincere, were found to be correlated positively with creativity in this Chinese sample. Implications on development of creative personality in one’s aging process were also discussed.