Between Mindfulness and Creativity: Conceptual or Experimental Creative Masters?

Prior research indicated that mindfulness has the potential to enhance individuals’ functioning in many ways. However, its relationship with creativity elicited contrasting results, remaining unresolved, and with a lack of clear understanding of its underlying processes. In this paper, we examine how two creative methods of solving open-ended problems – conceptual and experimental – as contrasting processes are acting in the relationship between mindfulness and creativity. We test our research model in three studies: two field studies (crowdwork Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, and employees from Italian and Croatian SMEs), and an experiment conducted at an EU-based university. The results of three studies converge in indicating that high mindfulness contributes to higher levels of conceptual creative method which, in turn, stimulates high creativity. However, mindfulness does not demonstrate the same effects on participants using the experimental creative method, and thereby creativity. Contributions and implications for the study of mindfulness and creativity are discussed.