Visual creativity in primary school children: Motivation and emotional coordinates: Results of an empirical study

Abstract

The article takes several approaches to explore visual creativity: first, as a type of creativity based on the visual representation of the world; second, as a process of creating new visual forms to convey semantic meaning; third, as person’s meta-ability to perceive, transform and create new visual information. We developed a hypothetical model of visual creativity and used a multifactorial approach to prove its validity. The model includes five symptom complexes: motivational, emotional, visual and intellectual, aesthetic, and existential. Motivation includes artistic and cognitive interest, creative motivation, and sensitivity to creative visual information. Thus, motivation constitutes an energy resource, while an emotional complex (expressive emotionality, aesthetic empathy, range of emotional experience) determines the content-related aspects of visual creativity. To analayse motivation and emotional components of visual creativity in primary school children, we conducted an ascertaining experiment of 203 primary school students. The diagnostics programme included traditional as well as new art-related diagnostic techniques developed by the authors: Semantic Differential (Ch. Osgood); expert methods (Visual Creativity; Artistic and Cognitive Interest); Map of Interests (A. I. Savenkov), Assessment of Artistic and Aesthetic Needs (V. S. Avanesov); the Barron-Welsh Art Scale (F. Barron, Y. Welsh); content analysis of expressive vocabulary in visual and verbal texts; Art and Expression Test; Emotional Thesaurus (modification of B.I. Dodonov’s methodology). The empirical research identified a range of psychological elements in motivation and emotional complex directly related to the manifestation and development prospects of visual creativity in primary school children. Among them are a relatively low share of artistic and cognitive interests in the current structure of child’s interests; a desynchrony between a high level of general creative motivation and a low level of sensitivity to creative visual information; a discrepancy between the dominant emotional expression and insufficient development of aesthetic empathy, etc. These psychological elements determine the prospects, content and tools of pedagogical support aimed at the development of motivation and the emotional sphere. The latter are the key for primary school children to creatively explore the modern visual space as multipolar and a step towards the development of visual creativity as a model of cognition of the world.