EXPLORING A TRIPARTITE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN REBELLIOUSNESS, OPENNESS TO EXPERIENCE AND CREATIVITY

Sixty-seven undergraduates completed the NEO-Personality Inventory (Costa & McCrae, 1985), the Rebelliousness Questionnaire (McDermott, 1987) and an author-devised creativity checklist. Reactive rebelliousness correlated positively with NEO-neurotic hostility (r = 0.52, p < .001) and negatively with NEO-openness to experience subscales (actions', r = −0.21, p =0.46; ‘ideas”, r = −0.31, p = 0.005) but not with frequency of self-reported creative interests and activities. A disaggregated measure of creative activities however, demonstrated a positive association between number of creative literary acts and proactive rebelliousness scores (r = 0.25, p = 0.02). All six NEO-openness subscales correlated positively with self-reported creative activities; five did so with creative interests. Specifically, openness to fantasy and openness to aesthetic experience correlated notably with creative activities (r = 0.45, p < 0.0005; r = 0.41, p < 0.005) and interests (r = 0.45, p < 0.0005; r = 0.5, p <0.0005). Thus, openness, as McCrae & Costa (1985) hypothesise, was highly predictive of self-reported creative acts and interests.