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Educational Psychology: AnInternational Journal of ExperimentalEducational PsychologyPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cedp20

Psychological adjustment of creativechildren: perspectives from self, peerand teacherWing Ling Lia, Jelena C.Y. Poona, Toby M.Y. Tonga & Sing Laua

a Center for Child Development, Hong Kong Baptist University,Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong.Published online: 02 Aug 2013.

To cite this article: Wing Ling Li, Jelena C.Y. Poon, Toby M.Y. Tong & Sing Lau (2013) Psychologicaladjustment of creative children: perspectives from self, peer and teacher, EducationalPsychology: An International Journal of Experimental Educational Psychology, 33:5, 616-627, DOI:10.1080/01443410.2013.824069

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01443410.2013.824069

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Psychological adjustment of creative children: perspectives fromself, peer and teacher

Wing Ling Li*, Jelena C.Y. Poon, Toby M.Y. Tong and Sing Lau

Center for Child Development, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong

(Received 17 September 2012; final version received 4 July 2013)

Previous research in the literature on the relationships between creativity andpsychological adjustment tended to use only one or two sources of creativityassessment and focus on a few aspects of adjustment. To examine creativechildren’s psychological adjustment more thoroughly, this exploratory studyassessed children’s creativity from multiple sources (objective assessment, teach-ers and peers) and incorporated multiple aspects of adjustment (self-concept,popularity and sociability). The sample consisted of 53 primary school children.Findings revealed that 10% of the children were selected by both teachers andpeers as creative, among whom half of these children were identified as creativebased on their creativity scores. Those identified as creative based on theWallach–Kogan creativity tests scores were more popular and perceived topossess sociability-leadership traits. Children perceived by teachers as creativesaw themselves as better in academic, social and general self-concept. Finally,those perceived by peers as creative rated themselves as better in appearanceself-concept. These findings provide a foundation for further research, and theirimplications are discussed.

Keywords: creative children; perceived creativity; popularity; sociability;self-concept

How well psychologically adjusted are creative children? On the one hand, assuggested by Lau, Li, and Chu (2004), creative children may be liked by their peersfor their ability to generate useful and novel ideas to solve problems and theirfunny ideas during social interactions. Runco, Johnson, and Bear (1993) noted thatteachers in their study used mostly positive adjectives such as cheerful, easygoingand friendly to describe creative children. On the other hand, creative children’sdisruptive and domineering behaviours may cause themselves trouble among peers(Lau et al., 2004). Being rejected can then harm these children’s self-confidence.Additionally, since people are more comfortable with what they are used to seeing,novel ideas generated by creative individuals may be viewed negatively and harshlycriticised (Sternberg & Lubart, 1995). As found by Gino and Ariely (2012), creativeindividuals also tended to be dishonest. This tendency to display unethicalbehaviours may harm creative individuals’ interpersonal relationships. Hence, it ispossible that creative children may encounter adjustment problems in their dailylife. Studies have reported teachers describing creative children as more likely to

*Corresponding author. Email: lingling@hkbu.edu.hk

Educational Psychology, 2013Vol. 33, No. 5, 616–627, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01443410.2013.824069

� 2013 Taylor & Francis

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display disruptive behaviours (Scott, 1999), more arrogant, attention seeking,opinionated, rebellious and self-centred (Chan & Chan, 1999).

In an attempt to address creative children’s psychological well-being, researchershave used various approaches to investigate the issue, although a conclusion has yetto be drawn. Although their method of gathering those data is unknown, Liberty,Jones, and McGuire (1963) had identified creative children based on existing datathey gathered. Creative children in this study were found to be rejected by theirpeers and perceived as negative models academically and behaviourally. Reid, King,and Wickwire (1959) also studied the relationship between children’s creativity andtheir psychological adjustment. They selected creative children by peer nominationand concluded that creative children tended to be more sociable, easygoing andwarm-hearted. In Rivlin’s (1959) study, a different identification method wasemployed; teachers were asked to nominate creative children. Those judged by theirteachers as creative tended to be more popular, but they also tended to have lowersocial confidence. Lau and Li (1996) used both teacher ratings and peer nominationto determine children’s degree of creativeness and revealed a relationship betweenperceived creativity and peer status. Popular children were the most creative,followed by controversial children, while rejected and neglected children werejudged to be the least creative. Finally, in Lau et al.’s (2004) study, ratings frompeers and group leaders served as indicators of children’s creativity. Thoseperceived as creative tended to be less liked and less preferred by their peers. Theyhad poorer self-concept and obtained higher scores on the aggressive-disruptive andsensitive-isolated measures. However, they also scored higher on the sociability-leadership measure than did the less creative children.

Two points regarding previous research on the relationship between creativityand psychological adjustment are worthy of note. Most of the studies focused onlyon a few aspects of psychological adjustment. Besides, with the exception of Lauand Li’s (1996) and Lau et al.’s (2004) studies, the aforementioned studiesemployed only one creativity assessment. Each form of creativity assessment has itsweaknesses (Lubart, 1994), as only one method may not provide an accurate andthorough picture of children’s creativity. Creativity tests may fail to reflect one’screative potential if the items bear little resemblance to everyday encounters(Cropley, 2000). Furthermore, as there are many domains of creative abilities, anindividual who is creative in one domain may not be considered creative in anotherdomain (Baer, 1998). Most creativity tests, however, are incapable of assessingsome dimensions of creativity; the social dimensions of creativity are often left outof the picture (Mouchiroud & Lubart, 2002), while social creativity has been foundto be positively related to the psychological aspects of social abilities and popularity(Mouchiroud & Bernoussi, 2008). Hence, creativity tests may reveal a less thoroughpicture of one’s creativity than teacher ratings and peer nomination do, as teachersand peers have spent time with the children in various settings and should be morecapable of assessing the children’s multiple creativity dimensions. As for teacherratings, though teachers are knowledgeable about their students’ creative potentialas they have known these students for a long period of time and have interactedwith them across a variety of school situations (Pearlman, 1983), their ratings ofthe creative students may be affected by the halo effect of academic performance(Karwowski, 2007) and intelligence (Nicholson & Moran, 1986). Finally, using peernomination has the advantage of children knowing each other as they haveinteracted with each other in at least one situation for a certain period of time

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(Kaufman, Plucker, & Baer, 2008); however, this assessment method too can beinfluenced by the halo effect as it relies on human judgement (Hocevar, 1981).Given the different features of the three kinds of assessment, it is clear that usingone method over another may lead to different results. Therefore, it is ideal to usemultiple approaches to study creativity. To our knowledge, no studies have investi-gated the relationships between creativity and psychological adjustment using morethan two sources of assessment and multiple psychological aspects simultaneously.

The limited psychological aspects examined by most previous research and thelack of studies looking at children’s creativity from multiple perspectives promptedthe present study to explore whether creative children adjust better or less wellpsychologically. The relationships between creativity and psychological adjustmentwere examined using three creativity assessment measurements (creativity test,teacher ratings and peer nomination) and three psychological aspects (self-concept,popularity and sociability; each with sub-domains). By doing so, it is expected thata clearer picture of the relationships could be revealed. With only three psychologi-cal domains, the scope of the study was by no means comprehensive; nonetheless,as an exploratory study, it is believed that the domains selected correspond to themain developmental areas relevant to primary school students and can enhance ourunderstanding of the relationships between creativity and psychological adjustment.As the first study to incorporate three types of creativity assessment and multiplepsychological aspects, the present exploratory study does not aim to resolve theinconsistencies from previous research altogether, but rather to provide a morethorough understanding of the relationships between creativity and psychologicaladjustment and to encourage more studies to consider incorporating multiplecreativity assessment methods and psychological aspects.

In order to minimise teachers’ influence on the peers’ judgement, theparticipants’ teachers and peers involved in the study came from two differentcontexts. Having judges from different contexts allowed for information aboutteacher-perceived creativity and peer-perceived creativity to be obtainedindependently of one another. Due to this desire to collect reliable informationabout perceived creativity, participants of a five-day-four-night programme wereselected to take part in this study. This context-independent design was arranged toaid the study of creative children’s psychological adjustment.

Method

Participants

A group of 53 primary school students (31 boys and 22 girls aged 8–12 years;M= 9.7, SD= .99) who participated in a five-day-four-night gifted enrichmentprogramme were included in this study. All participants and their parents consentedto join this study. The participants were accepted to the programme based onteacher recommendation and group interview. Their intellectual ability ranged fromaverage to above average (M= 115.28, SD= 14.30) based on Raven’s progressivematrices test (Raven, Raven, & Court, 2003).

Instruments

In the present study, three measures were used to assess participants’ creativity andthree to measure their psychological adjustment.

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Measures of creativity

Creative potential was assessed by the Chinese version of the Wallach–Kogancreativity tests (WKCT) (Wallach & Kogan, 1965; see Lau & Cheung, 2010 for testscoring). For the present study, four items of the WKCT (1 uses, 1 similarities, 1line meanings, and 1 pattern meanings) were used, and they were scored in termsof fluency, flexibility, unusualness and uniqueness. Participants were allowed 7minto answer each item. In the present study, uniqueness score could not be generatedbecause no response fulfilled the required frequency (percentage 61.0%) as definedby Runco and Albert (1985).

Teacher-perceived creativity was measured by a part of the scale for teacherratings (STR) on the teacher recommendation form for programme application. Itwas a four-point scale (1 = seldom to 4 = all the time) designed for the programmecovering four aspects: achievement motivation, learning ability, creativity and socialability, and has been used for over 10 years. In the STR, the five items whichmeasure creativity were used in the present study. Upon analyses of the reliabilityof these items, satisfactory internal consistency was resulted, with Cronbach’s alphaof .83.

Peer-perceived creativity was obtained from the peer nomination on the addeditem of the revised class play measure (RCP) (Lau & Li, 1996; Lau et al., 2004)designed by Masten, Morison, and Pellegrini (1985). The item asked therespondents to nominate a fellow participant with many creative ideas.

Based on their WKCT (creative potential), STR (teacher-perceived creativity)and RCP (peer-perceived creativity) scores, children were grouped into three highand low creative groups accordingly (see Table 2).

Measures of psychological adjustment

The multi-perspective multi-domain self-concept inventory (MMSI) (Cheung &Lau, 2001) is a four-point self-rated scale ranging from 1 to 4 (false, partly false,partly true and true). It measured the students’ self-concept, one of the indices ofpsychological adjustment, in four domains: academic, appearance, social andgeneral. The reliability of the MMSI and the four domains of self-concept wereanalysed; all had satisfactory internal consistency. Cronbach’s alpha for the overallitems as well as the academic, appearance, social and general domains was .92, .84,.69, .69 and .84, respectively.

The like-most–like-least (LM–LL) (Coie & Dodge, 1988) asked participants toname three fellow participants they liked the most and three they liked the least.There were four sub-scores which indicated the participants’ popularity; theseincluded like-most (LM), like-least (LL), social preference (subtraction of LL fromLM scores) and social impact (addition of LM and LL scores).

The RCP was used to measure the participants’ sociability in terms of threeaspects of social characteristics: sociability-leadership, aggressive-disruptive andsensitive-isolated. Participants were asked to pretend to be a director and assigntheir fellow participants to each of the 30 roles, including the added one related tocreativity. Self-nomination and repeated nomination of the same person werenot allowed. In the original RCP, the sociability-leadership aspect included 15 items(e.g. ‘good leader’ and ‘everyone listens to’). Among the other 15 items, eightitems comprised the aggressive-disruptive characteristics (e.g. ‘loses temper easily’and ‘gets into a lot of fights’), and seven items were related to the sensitive-isolated

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characteristics (e.g. ‘often left out’ and ‘feelings get hurt easily’). In the presentstudy, some items were removed from calculation of the subscales in order to attainbetter internal consistency. The values of coefficient alpha were at or nearacceptable levels. Cronbach’s alpha was .65, .76, .62 and .49 for the overall, socia-bility-leadership, aggressive-disruptive and sensitive-isolated items, respectively.

Procedure

The WKCT and the MMSI were group administered to measure participants’creative potential and self-concept, respectively prior to the programme. On the lastday of the programme, two peer-nomination measures, the LM–LL and the RCPwere administered to the participants to measure their popularity and sociability,respectively, as two other important indices of psychological adjustment. The addedcreativity item on the RCP served to provide the participants’ peer-perceivedcreativity. By the end of the programme, participants would have sufficientinteraction with each other for the nomination.

The five-day-four-night gifted enrichment programme in which participants tookpart in lasted a total of approximately 62 h. During the programme, a variety ofactivities were arranged; these included seminars, workshops, classes, tours, fieldtrips, projects and small group activities. Due to the overnight nature of theprogramme, participants also had meals together. Thus, the programme providedample time and opportunities for participants to get to know each other and interactin various situations.

Results

To explore the relationships among perceived creativity, creative potential andpsychological adjustment, Pearson’s correlation analyses were performed on allcreativity ratings and psychological measures. The results for all participantsshowed that there were no significant associations among teacher-perceivedcreativity, peer-perceived creativity and creative potential. This showed that thethree sources of creativity information were independent of each other.

The relationships of the three creativity measures with the three psychologicaladjustment measures were then examined. Table 1 shows that no significantcorrelation was found between peer-perceived creativity and all the psychologicalparameters, whereas teacher-perceived creativity was significantly correlated to aca-demic, social and general self-concepts, as well as the LM and social impact scores.For creative potential, the fluency and flexibility measures of the WKCT were foundto have significant positive correlations with the LM and the social preferencescores, while fluency was also found to have a significant positive correlation withacademic self-concept, and flexibility with the sociability-leadership measure.

Following the correlation analyses, group comparisons were performed toexamine the differences on creativity ratings and the psychological parametersbetween the low-creative and high-creative children. Based on the scoring on thecreativity item added to the RCP, participants who received no peer nominationwere classified into the low creative group (n= 36), whereas those who received atleast one peer nomination were assigned to the high-creative group (n= 17).Additionally, the participants were also divided into another set of creativity groupsbased on the teacher rating on Item 2 of the STR that directly asked teachers to rate

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if the student could generate many ideas and solutions to solve different kinds ofproblems. The STR adopted a four-point scale; therefore, participants who receivedscores of 1 (seldom) or 2 (sometimes) were assigned to the low-creative group(n= 34), while the others who scored 3 or 4 (often and all the time, respectively)were classified into the high-creative group (n= 19). For grouping using creativepotential assessment, participants who obtained the total WKCT score at and above66th percentile (49.91) were assigned to the high-creative group (n= 18), and therest were in the low-creative group (n= 35). About 10% (n= 6) of all participantswere identified as high-creative individuals by both peer and teacher (see Table 2).Furthermore, half of them in this group could be termed as highly creative individu-als based on their total WKCT score.

Table 1. Correlations between creativity measures and psychological measures.

Perceivedcreativity Creative potential

Psychological measures Teacher Peer Fluency Flexibility Unusualness Total

Self-conceptAcademic .39⁄⁄ .19 .30⁄ .24 .04 .23Appearance .19 .29 .05 .00 �.07 .00Social .37⁄ .12 .10 .07 �.19 .00General .50⁄⁄⁄ .18 .14 .10 �.11 .06

PopularityLike-most .32⁄ �.02 .32⁄ .33⁄ .16 .31⁄Like-least .06 .01 �.15 �.16 �.12 �.16Social preference .16 �.02 .28⁄ .30⁄ .17 .28⁄Social impact .33⁄ .00 .15 .14 .03 .13

SociabilitySociability-leadership �.04 .09 .22 .27⁄ .14 .24Aggressive-disruptive .02 .10 �.08 �.16 �.01 �.09Sensitive-isolated �.07 .13 �.15 �.17 .07 �.15

⁄p < .05, ⁄⁄p < .01, ⁄⁄⁄p < .001.

Table 2. Distribution of students in the two creative groups from three sources.

Peer

TotalLow High

Teacher:Low 34Creative potential

Low 18 6High 5 5

Teacher:High 19Creative potential

Low 8 3High 5 3

Total 36 17 53

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Adding the creative potential scores from the WKCT into the analysis showedthat 42% (8 out of 19; ranged from 54 to 96) of the high-creative individualsdetermined by the teacher assessment had scores above 66th percentile on theWKCT. Among the high-creative individuals determined by the peer assessment, asimilar percentage, about 47% (8 out of 17; ranged from 56.5 to 83), scored above66th percentile on the WKCT. In addition, data transformation was done to improvethe normality of the peer-nominated scores on sociability and popularity from theRCP and LM–LL measures to satisfy the statistical assumptions in groupcomparison analyses.

Group comparison on the psychological parameters from the peers’ andteachers’ perspectives revealed dissimilar results. From the teachers’ perspective,the high-creative group scored significantly higher than the low-creative group onacademic, social and general self-concepts, as well as the social impact measure(see Table 3). From the peers’ perspective, with the exception of appearance self-concept, there were no significant group differences between the high-creative andlow-creative groups. Interestingly, among the insignificant results, the high-creativegroup scored lower on the three popularity measures of LM, social preference andsocial impact. These findings were contrary to the findings according to teacherratings. Furthermore, from the perspective of creative potential assessment, thefindings were also dissimilar to the findings using the previous two perspectives.The high-creative group scored significantly higher than the low-creative group onthe sociability-leadership and two popularity measures of LM and social preferencebut lower on the LL measure.

Moreover, subsequent nonparametric tests were performed to each psychologicalvariable to re-examine the differences between two independent samples, thelow-creative and high-creative groups. Significant group differences obtained in thenonparametric tests were almost identical to those of the t-tests with the exceptionof the group difference on the LL measure in the perspective of creative potentialmeasurement. These further confirmed the group effect on each psychologicalvariable.

Discussion and conclusion

The overarching goal of the present study was to examine the relationships betweencreativity, as indicated by three sources of rating, and three psychological aspects,namely self-concept, popularity and sociability. Prior to analysing theserelationships, the sources of creativity rating were studied, and an absence ofsignificant relationships among creative potential, teacher-perceived creativity andpeer-perceived creativity was revealed. Only 10% of the children (n= 6) wereselected by both their teachers and their peers as creative, and half of these children(n= 3) were identified as creative based on their creativity test scores. It seems thatteachers and peers judged creativity differently; yet neither of these views wascongruent with the definition of creativity of the field. A closer look at thedistribution of children in the high-creative and low-creative groups further revealedthat the group with the highest number of children (n= 18) was the one indicatedby all three assessments as low in creativity, while the high-creative groupaccording to all three perspectives was one of the two groups that had the fewestchildren (n= 3). It seems that though the effectiveness of using all three assessmentstogether in selecting highly creative children remains uncertain, they can be useful

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Table3.

Means

ofthepsychologicalmeasuresby

creativ

egroups

bythreesources.

Teacher

Peer

Creativepotential

Psychological

measures

High-creativ

e(n=19)

Low

-creative

(n=34)

T-value

(df=

51)

High-creativ

e(n=17)

Low

-creative

(n=36)

T-value

(df=

51)

High-creativ

e(n=18)

Low

-creative

(n=35)

T-value

(df=

51)

M(SD)

M(SD)

M(SD)

M(SD)

M(SD)

M(SD)

Creativepotential

Fluency

22.50(8.87)

19.56(8.01)

�1.23

23.35(8.76)

19.32(7.97)

�1.67

Flexibility

16.92(5.95)

14.72(4.81)

�1.47

16.62(5.20)

14.99(5.33)

�1.05

Unusualness

7.24

(7.15)

6.99

(5.85)

�.14

9.24

(7.72)

6.06

(5.29)

�1.75

Total

46.66(19.73)

41.26(16.25)

�1.07

49.21(19.78)

40.36(15.95)

�1.74

Self-concept

Academic

3.15

(.56)

2.73

(.68)

�2.20⁄

3.08

(.62)

2.79

(.67)

�1.41

3.05

(.57)

2.79

(.70)

�1.28

Appearance

2.51

(.53)

2.33

(.45)

�1.26

2.59

(.46)

2.30

(.46)

�2.05⁄

2.40

(.39)

2.39

(.53)

�.07

Social

3.02

(.56)

2.69

(.48)

�2.08⁄

2.89

(.52)

2.78

(.54)

�.69

2.81

(.43)

2.82

(.58)

.03

General

3.26

(.62)

2.61

(.57)

�3.60⁄

⁄2.99

(.84)

2.78

(.56)

�.88

2.85

(.77)

2.85

(.61)

�.01

Popularity

Like-most

3.32

(1.45)

2.44

(1.60)

�1.97

2.65

(1.69)

2.81

(1.56)

.34

3.67

(1.53)

2.29

(1.43)

�3.25⁄

Like-least

2.68

(4.35)

2.26

(2.82)

�.43

2.59

(3.02)

2.33

(3.62)

�.25

1.28

(1.07)

3.00

(4.02)

2.37

⁄Socialpreference

.24(1.8)

�.18

(1.57)

�.89

�.15

(1.69)

.03(1.66)

.35

.88(1.12)

�.49

(1.7)

�3.08⁄

⁄Socialim

pact

.41(1.31)

�.26

(.95)

�2.14⁄

�.04

(.98)

�.02

(1.20)

.07

.21(.88)

�.14

(1.23)

�1.07

Sociability

Sociability-

leadership

�.08

(.53)

.03(.50)

.71

.04(.48)

�.03

(.52)

�.49

.18(.59)

�.11

(.43)

�2.04⁄

Aggressive-

disruptiv

e.07(.58)

�.02

(.74)

�.45

.11(.79)

�.03

(.63)

�.71

�.08

(.49)

.06(.76)

.67

Sensitiv

e-isolated

�.04

(.48)

.04(.62)

.49

.12(.71)

�.04

(.50)

�.93

�.05

(.56)

.05(.59)

�.58

⁄ p<.05,

⁄⁄p<.01.

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in identifying children who need more support in developing their creativepotential. Nonetheless, future research is needed to examine the distribution ofchildren in the high-creative and low-creative groups with a larger sample, as onlya small number of children was chosen as creative by more than one source ofassessment. For now, since creativity can be viewed in a number of ways: person,process, press and product (Runco, 2004), it could be that teachers and peers lookedat different aspects of creativity. Further investigation would be necessary todetermine which aspects of creativity teachers and peers would focus on andwhether or not there is a difference in emphasis between the two groups of judges.

The discrepancy among the three measurements may be explained by additionalreasons. In the case of teacher ratings, teachers might also have been influenced bythe halo effect of academic achievement (Karwowski, 2007), intelligence(Nicholson & Moran, 1986), or other factors when judging a child’s creativity. Infact, creativity and general intelligence are, to a certain extent, overlapped whengeneral intelligence is below a discriminative threshold (Runco, 2010; Sternberg &O’Hara, 1999). Thus, teacher ratings on students’ creativity may be very likelyclouded by the students’ general intelligence. Potential factors such as academicachievement and intelligence influencing teacher ratings on students’ creativity isworthy of additional research.

As for peer nomination, it depended on the display of creative ideas andbehaviours by the participating children during the enrichment programme. Thenovel environment and experiences in the enrichment programme might havecaused some children to experience high social anxiety, which could, in turn, affecttheir creative performance (Kimbrel, 2008; Paul & Nathan, 2010). This may helpexplain why some participants were rated as creative by their teachers and/or thescores of creativity test but not regarded as creative by their peers. If this is thecase, these children might have difficulties adapting to new environments. To them,a longer period and different set of warm-up activities may be of benefit. Futureresearch would benefit from exploring whether children experience adaptabilityproblems and how these problems may affect their display of creativity. In the pres-ent study, there were also children who were identified as creative by their peersbut not by their teachers. This could be due to the nature of the school environmentand the context of the enrichment programme. At these children’s schools, emphasismight be placed on academic performance and not creativity, resulting in thesechildren’s lack of display of creative behaviours and thus their low scores on theteacher ratings of creativity. The enrichment programme, however, encouraged crea-tivity. These children might hence be more likely to exhibit their creative potentialand be nominated by their peers as creative.

From the present study, findings on creative children’s psychological adjustmentrevealed that children identified as creative based on scores from the creativity test(WKCT) were more popular (scoring higher on the LM and social preferencemeasures on both the t-test and the non-parametric test, while lower on the LLmeasure based only on the t-test) and perceived to possess sociability-leadershiptraits. Teacher-perceived creative children were found to have better academic,social and general self-concepts. Regarding their popularity, they had higher socialimpact scores, so they seemed to participate in social interaction, but theeffectiveness of their strategies is unknown and therefore needs to be furtherinvestigated. Finally, those viewed by their peers as creative were better inappearance self-concept. In general, creative children, regardless of the source of

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rating, seemed to be better adjusted than or equally well adjusted as other childrenin the psychological areas studied.

The insignificant results, nevertheless, showed the tendency that peer-perceivedcreative children were less popular (having lower scores on the LM, socialpreference and social impact measures, while scoring higher on the LL measure)than their less creative counterparts. Again, possible social anxiety caused by thenovel experience (Kimbrel, 2008; Paul & Nathan, 2010) during the enrichmentcamp might have affected the selection of creative children by peers and hence therelationships between peer-perceived creativity and the psychological domains. Asthe popularity and sociability-leadership domains were also judged by peers, it ispossible that if the children had more time to adapt to the new environment andinteract with their peers, they would be able to display their popularity andsociability-leadership traits differently. These may account for the direction of thepopularity scores from the peers’ perspective and the lack of significant differencein the sociability-leadership scores between peer-perceived creative children andother children. Though the results were insignificant, the difference in direction ofpopularity scores found from the peers’ perspective warrants further research.

The findings of the present study provide preliminary evidence that whencompared to their less creative counterparts, creative children seem to be adjustingbetter or at least equally well in terms of the self-concept, popularity and sociabil-ity-leadership domains. Further directions, in addition to the ones suggestedthroughout this discussion, could examine the relationships between creativity andpsychological adjustment using additional creativity assessment ratings and/or dif-ferent psychological aspects. For this age group, parent ratings and sibling ratingsof creativity and psychological adjustment may be of particular value, since parentsand siblings are important parts of school children’s life. The question of generalis-ability could be pursued as well by involving a different age group and/or choosinga different context. Due to the sample size of the present study, statistical analysesthat could be done were limited. Future research with a larger sample size wouldallow for additional analyses to be performed and could enrich our understandingof the relationships between creativity and psychological adjustment.

In the very end, one may wonder what the significance of raising the questionof creative children’s psychological adjustment is. Overall speaking, creativity isbeneficial to various aspects including problem solving, adaptability, self-expressionand health (Runco, 2004). Thus, creativity is desired and should be encouraged. Itis an important human resource to a person, a society, a country and a culture.However, the environments in which a person interacts with may suppress, inhibitor stimulate creativity depending on how people in these environments view thisperson and his/her creativity. More specifically, if creative children’s teachersdisprove of their behaviours, these children may learn to exhibit less of theircreative potential. If their peers do not support their behaviours, they may be evenless likely to exercise their creative potential. The same is true for other people theyinteract with. If few people support their creative development, their creativity maycease to develop or even regress. It is for this reason that creative children’spsychological adjustment needs to be investigated. Our study suggested a strongrelationship between creativity and the social aspects of psychological adjustmentand that creative children may be better or equally well adjusted when compared toless creative children. It also demonstrated that creative education is beneficialnot only to children’s creative potential but also to the social aspects of their

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psychological adjustment; hence, creative education should be promoted. Finally,our preliminary study has shed light on the issue of creative children’spsychological adjustment; it also hopes to encourage more studies to be conducted.

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