New research published in Frontiers in Psychology suggests that certain types of creative activity can help alleviate the anxiety evoked by thinking about death, particularly among those who are searching for meaning in life.
There was an inevitable exposure to death-related information or situations during the COVID-19 outbreak that activated people’s awareness of mortality and triggered negative emotional responses, such as anxiety and fear,” the study author at Nankai University tells LiveScience.
As creativity researchers, we were interested in seeing if the anxiety that is evoked by mortality salience could be mitigated by engaging in creative activities. There have been a few studies looking into the role of creativity in the perception of mortality, but the results have been mixed. There was a moderating effect of searching for meaning in life, as the current study distinguished between good and bad creative activities.
Two studies were conducted by Zhou and her colleagues to investigate the link between creativity and death-induced fear.
168 college students were randomly assigned to read either a news report on the COVID-19 death toll or a news report on the impact of COVID-19 on tourism in Study 1. A creative task that required either benevolent or malevolent creativity was then given to the participants at random. In the benevolent creativity task, researchers asked participants to come up with ways to raise money for a non-profit. Malevolent creativity asked participants to think of ways to leak damaging information about a rival company. Finally, the test subjects filled out a questionnaire to gauge how anxious they are right now.
In the second study, 221 college students were randomly assigned to write about their own death or dental pain. After that, they were given the same benevolent or malevolent creative tasks as in Study 1 and were to complete them at random. In addition, participants completed an assessment of their current level of anxiety and a search for meaning in life.
Evidence from the studies showed that benevolent creativity (but not evil or satanic creativity) could help alleviate the fear of death.
Researchers found that engaging in benevolent creative activities (such as helping others or protecting their interests in original ways) rather than malevolent creative activities (such as harming others or damaging their interests for personal benefit in original ways) may be an effective way to cope with mortality threat. Benevolent creativity’s ability to alleviate anxiety was only observed in participants who had a higher level of life-searching, indicating that individual differences should also be taken into account in the guidance of creative activities under mortality-salient conditions.
Zhou pointed out the study’s limitations, including the fact that it only included college students. To increase the generalizability of these findings, further studies could investigate the role of creativity as it relates to the mortality salience effect among a larger group of participants, such as the elderly or children, she said.
When it comes to most empirical research, Zhou says that creativity is treated like an end result to be measured and studied as a separate variable. Creativity research has grown in recent years, and academics are becoming more concerned about the potential positive effects of creativity. Follow-up research will also continue to focus on the crucial role of creativity in mental health and personal growth (including creative activity, creative personality, creative achievement, etc.).”