Philip M. Clark

Dream reports of Subjects High and Low in Creative Ability

Summary This study explored the relationships between several aspects of dream reports and creative potential. Ten high creative and 10 low creative Ss were selected from a pool of 423 male and female university undergraduates on the basis of uniformly high or low performance on several measures of creativity. Dream reports were collected under carefully controlled sleep laboratory conditions. Dream reports of high and low creative Ss were discriminable along identifiable dimensions of dream setting, novelty, uniqueness, and number of content elements.

Response Frequency as a Function of Remote Associational Ability, Type of Verbal Stimulus, and Serial Position of Response.

This study investigated predictions from Mednicks remote associates theory as to unusualness of response in a word association task as a function of remote associational ability (high or low scores on the RAT), the nature of the verbal stimulus (flat or steep hierarchy words), and the serial position of the response. Ss were Ohio high school students. Although high RAT scorers gave significantly less unusual responses overall than did low RAT scorers, results were interpreted as generally supportive of the theory. Low RAT scorers moved more rapidly to less frequent responses than did high RAT scorers, later responses were more infrequent than earlier responses in the sample tested, and while word-type did not in itself determine unusualness of response, it did interact with the other variables in a manner consistent with the theory.