Is relational theory a better answer to the psychology of creativity

The present paper will first review the prevalent trend of promoting creativity education in four Chinese societies (China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan) (Hui & Lau, 2010). The relational theory of creativity proposed by Gla˘veanu (2012) provides a critical basis for analyze the five dichotomies of creativity include individuals versus society, Big C versus little c, evolutionary versus revolutionary, domain generality versus domain specificity, and product versus process in the Chinese context. The relational perspective offers and extends an interdependent and interactive approach to the study of creativity. In parallel, the action theory of Brandtstadter (1997) on the convergence of action, culture and development will be adopted as a theoretical framework to investigate how creative self-efficacy in a sample of about 1,729 Hong Kong adults is related to psychological and sociocultural factors across the lifespan aged from 18 to 60 above. Regression analyses have shown that both psychological factors (perceived desirable gains in creative personality, perceived losses in creative personality and self assessed creative personality) and cultural factors (normative belief in creativity, and rewards for creativity in society) explained a significant variance of 44% in predicting creative self-efficacy. The cultural factors mediated the effects of psychological factors on creative self-efficacy. Results supported that cultural factors emphasized in the relational perspective were as important as the individual psychological factors in building up creative self-efficacy in individuals. Implications and limitations will be discussed.