Effects Of Temporal Distance And Regulatory Focus On Creativity

As the most important economic resources in the 21 st century, creativity has become the core competence that enable the young people survive in the ever-changing environment(Florida, 2002; Shalley, Zhou, &Oldham, 2004).Developing the educatees' creativity also thus has become the goal of contemporary education. In order to develop individual creativity, the increasing researchers pay their attention to the influential factors of creativity have got the more and more attention of the(Niu, 2007). Temporal distance, the psychological dimension of time,put forward based the development of Construal Level Theory, was one of these factors. Overseas studies have shown that temporal distance have significant effect on variant cognitive tasks(Forster, Friedman & Liberman, 2004). Creativity as one of cognitive tasks will be influenced by the temporal distance, but what kind of nature of the influence of temporal distance is, and how the temporal distance play a role in creativity? Domestic and foreign researches related to temporal distance are mainly concentrated in temporal distance on consumer decision-making, risk preference,negotiation and persuasion, moral and regret, however, the study of temporal distance-creativity is relatively rare. In view of this, this article tries to introduce temporal distance concept into creativity to explore temporal distance effect on creativity when people face the creative subject. And we suppose temporal distance influences creativity, regulatory focus as the motive factors plays a mediating role in temporal distance and creativity.This study designed six studies to investigate the effects and mechanisms of temporal distance on creativity. The results of these studies supported thehypothesizes and came to the conclusion as these:(1) The distant temporal distance enhanced performance on the overall task(e.g.,divergent thinking task) and the near temporal distance enhanced performance on the detail-oriented task(e.g., compare similarities and differences between the task).(2) The distant temporal distance induced promotion focus while the near temporal distance induced prevention focus.(3) The promotion focus mediated the relationship between the distant temporal distance and the overall task and the prevention focus mediated the relationship between the near temporal distance and the detail task. The results were consistent in the two studies using Remote Associates Test and divergent thinking task respectively.(4) The participants' evaluation about the creative advertising information under the distant temporal distance condition is significantly higher than under the near temporal distance condition, while the participants' evaluation about the detailed advertising information under the near temporal distance condition is significantly higher than under the distant temporal distance condition.(5) The participants were not aware of the differential effects of the distant temporal distance and near temporal distance on the overall task and detail-oriented task.