What type of curious person are you?
Understanding yourself as a creative practitioner is about more than technique. You need to be able to recognise and pay attention to the habits, motivations and psychological patterns shaping your practice.
Applied Creative Psychology sits at the meeting point between psychological research and creative practice. It offers ways for artists, musicians, filmmakers and other creatives to better understand how their processes actually function. At the heart of all of this sits a simple but powerful driver: curiosity.
How do you measure curiosity?
If you've clicked on this article, it's likely that you are a curious person. Someone who had their interest piqued by the title or perhaps is looking to learn more about the concept of curiosity and how it relates to the Psychology of Creativity. Curiosity does not come in one colour. It is multidimensional and a far more sophisticated psychological concept than the surface level understanding.
Todd Kashdan and colleagues at George Mason University conducted a study on curiosity involving thousands of participants. From the results, they constructed a model of curiosity that has five dimensions, in which four archetypes of ‘Curious People’ emerged.
Five dimensions of curiosity
Joyous exploration
Curiosity that is driven by the intrinsic pleasure of learning, linked to playfulness, creativity and positive emotions. This is the prototypical understanding of curiosity.
Deprivation Sensitivity
This dimension has a linkage to the emotions of anxiety and tension that come with an intense desire to solve problems and reduce gaps in knowledge.
Stress Tolerance
This term encapsulates the willingness to embrace doubt and confusion that come up in the process of learning and exploring the unknown
Social Curiosity
Wanting to understand our fellow human beings- what drives them, what they are thinking- by observing behavioural patterns and talking through thoughts and feelings.
Thrill Seeking
The willingness to take risks in order to have experiences that would not otherwise be possible by remaining in one’s zone of comfort.
Four archetypes of curious people
The Fascinated
Scored highly on all 5 dimensions of curiosity, particularly joyous exploration
Problem Solvers
Scored highly on deprivation sensitivity, medium on other dimensions
Empathisers
Scored highly on social curiosity, medium on other dimensions
Avoiders
Scored low on all dimensions
You may already identify yourself with one of the subcategories – or perhaps are placing a person you know into one.
This framework helps demonstrate how curiosity is experienced differently by different people. It is also strongly linked to creativity and wellbeing. It’s not just about the amount of curiosity that is experienced by an individual that makes them curious. It is also about the quality of the curiosity that they experience. By understanding curiosity in this way and looking at it in more granularity we can better understand how to harness our own curiosity in our creative practice, or in whatever other application we desire. You can use this framework next time you find yourself in a creative block to identify areas you might be naturally curious and work towards shaping your creative practice around what you naturally gravitate towards.
References
Kashdan, T.B. et al. (2018) ‘The five-dimensional curiosity scale: Capturing the bandwidth of curiosity and identifying four unique subgroups of curious people’, Journal of Research in Personality, 73, pp. 130–149. doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2017.11.011.
Deepening your practice through applied psychology
Research like Kashdan's curiosity model represents just one example of how psychological frameworks can illuminate creative practice. Applied creative psychology draws on established research from personality psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience, then translates these findings into practical tools for creative professionals.
Whether you're a "Fascinated" artist who thrives on cross-disciplinary exploration, a "Problem Solver" producer working through technical challenges, or an "Empathiser" filmmaker drawn to character development, understanding these patterns can inform everything from how you structure your projects to how you navigate creative blocks.
Our Applied Creative Psychology MA explores these connections in depth, combining psychological research with hands-on application for practicing artists and creative
