Does Playing Video Games Increase Emotional Creativity?

Inna Čábelková, Wadim Strielkowski, Anna Rybakova and Alla Molchanovа
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Inna Čábelková: Department of Trade and Finance, Faculty of Economics and Management, Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, Kamýcká 129, 16500 Prague, Czech Republic
Anna Rybakova: Department of Social, General and Clinical Psychology, Russian State Social University, 4/1 Wilhelm Pieck str., 129226 Moscow, Russian Federation
Alla Molchanovа: Department of Psychology and Pedagogy of Education, Moscow Psychologic-Social University, 9a Roshchinsky 4th Passage, 115191 Moscow, Russian Federation

IJERPH, 2020, vol. 17, issue 7, 1-12

Abstract: Emotional creativity (EC), which constitutes a main aspect of the general creativity concept, is often shown to be substantially related to positive emotional experiences, effective motivation, and innovation at the workplace as well as at school. However, little is known about the relationship between emotional creativity and the time people tend to spend playing video games. Nowadays, video games and virtual reality have become an important aspect of public health and psychological research. They constitute a key element of popular culture and generate considerable economic profit as part of the public entertainment industry. Our study is based on the results of an emotional creativity inventory (ECI) survey that was administered at a snowball and convenient sample of 453 respondents (aged 18–60 years, M ± SD: 23.68 ± 6.36; 66.40% women, 20.00% with higher education) from the Czech Republic who were questioned about their habits and the time they devote to playing video games. The sample country was selected as one with a long tradition of homebrew video gaming going back to the 1980s. We employed a set of multinomial regression analyses, which revealed that more time devoted to playing video games is associated with lower emotional creativity, in general, as well as with lower novelty, preparedness, and effectiveness components of emotional creativity. The negative association above was less pronounced for women than for men. Moreover, in a sample containing only women, a longer time devoted to playing video games was associated with the higher novelty component of emotional creativity (the associations with the other two components were not statistically significant for women only). Our findings might considerably contribute to the study of the general overall long-term effect of video games and the use of digital technologies in general on public health.

Keywords: emotional creativity; video games; public health; digital technology; gender (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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