Grasping Creative Valences: A Person-Centered Study on Creativity as A Resource for Young People’s Optimal Identity Formation

Forming an optimal identity is a complex task for young people because it requires distinctive personal resources that are flexible and sensitive to their context. One of these resources, creativity, has been explored in recent psychological literature showing ambiguous relationships with identity development. The present study aims to investigate if and when creativity can be a resource for individual well-being during late adolescence and young adulthood, by including the valences of positive creativity (the use of the creative process to achieve something beneficial to oneself or to the society) and negative creativity (the use of creativity to meet morally questionable goals). The focus is an application of a person-centered approach, latent profile analysis to creativity-identity issues. Participants were 338 adolescents who attended the last year of various high schools in Italy. We used five self-report measures of identity development, creativity valence and specific psychosocial correlates to examine the association between creativity valences, identity processes and both well- and ill-being. Using LPA, we found evidence of four qualitatively and quantitatively distinct subgroups or types of individuals differentiated on the basis of the interplay between creativity and identity. Suggestions for developing interventions to foster creativity in this age group are discussed.