Does Music Enhance Creativity in Children? An Experimental Investigation Into the Relation Between Creativity, Mood and Music

Abstract

Previous research has shown that listening to positive mood-inducing music can improve creativity measured by divergent thinking tasks. However, no studies have investigated the possibility of such an effect in young children. The aim of the present study was to observe if the mood-inducing properties of musical stimuli might elicit improvement in creativity scores in comparison to another auditory stimuli (book-reading). Participating children (3- and 4-year-olds recruited from two kindergartens in Oslo) were split between two conditions: music and book-reading. In the music condition, each child listened to familiar children’s songs, while in the book-reading condition, each child listened to the experimenter’s reading of a colorful children’s book. Immediately after listening to music or book reading, the divergent creativity performance scores (fluency and originality) of the children were obtained through the Unusual Box Test (Hoicka et al., 2013). The results of the statistical analysis show a small, but not significant tendency for higher fluency and originality scores in the music condition. Possible reasons for the differences from previous studies are discussed in the thesis.