UPCOMING — e32: SPECIAL EVENT — Navigating Creativity: On Self-Regulation of Creative Action
Wednesday, Oct 22nd, 2025
18:30-20:00 GMT (London, UK) • 1:30-3:00pm EST (North America, Eastern)
Join us for a special edition of the Creative Minds Reading Club. We are delighted to welcome a special guest, Dr. Aleksandra Zielińska, to present on:
“Navigating Creativity: On Self-Regulation of Creative Action.”
This session will explore how people guide their creative actions. Why do some creative projects thrive while others fall apart, despite the promising ideas that sparked them? This talk explores these questions through the lens of self-regulation in creative action. It examines how people monitor and manage their thoughts, emotions, motivation, and behaviors during creative pursuits—and how these approaches shape outcomes. Methodologically, the talk moves from static, correlational findings to dynamic, microlongitudinal designs. Substantively, it highlights the role of individual differences in self-regulation, outlines what effective management of creative action entails, and shares insights into interventions that can support people in the pursuit of creative goals.
🔬 Dr. Aleksandra Zielińska
Aleksandra Zielińska is a researcher at the Creative Behavior Lab in the Institute of Psychology, University of Wrocław, Poland. Her work focuses on the different ways people act on their creativity and realize their creative goals. She also explores how creativity can be supported in everyday contexts. In 2023, she received Frank X. Barron Award from the American Psychological Association’s Division 10, which honors superior contributions to the psychology of aesthetics, creativity, and the arts by students. She is an assistant editor for the Journal of Creative Behavior and serves on the editorial boards of several leading creativity journals
🔗 Find out more about Aleksandra’s work here: Lab Website | Publications
📄 Zielińska, Lebuda, Czerwonka, & Karwowski (2024)
Self-Regulation Prompts Improve Creative Performance. The Journal of Creative Behavior, 59(1), e674. DOI: 10.1002/jocb.674
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While people approach creative actions in diverse ways, navigating them effectively requires self-regulatory effort. In this preregistered experiment, we examined whether simple self-regulation prompts, provided across the stages of the creative process, make the outcomes more creative. Participants (N= 332) engaged in one of three creativity tasks—designing a logo, writing a short story, or preparing a greeting card—and documented their ongoing progress with photos. During the task, half of the participants received prompts tailored to their task progress, encouraging the employment of various self-regulatory mechanisms (e.g., uncertainty acceptance, adjusting approach). Consistent with our predictions, promoting a strategic approach throughout the task led participants to develop more creative products than those in the no-prompt condition. Moreover, we demonstrated two indirect paths behind the prompts’ effectiveness: first, via enhancing positive active emotions, and second, through fostering a greater time commitment to the task. On a theoretical level, the proposed prompting approach highlights the advantages of self-regulatory engagement during creative actions beyond solely idea generation strategies. Methodologically, our study underscores the simplicity of such interventions and their potential broad applicability.
👋🏼 Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you need a pdf of the article.