Linking Creativity and Temperament in Preschool Children

A review of pertinent literature supports the need to clarify the anecdotal reports by early childhood practitioners of a relationship between the creative behaviors of children three to five years old and their temperament. The hypothesis of Linking Creativity and Temperament in Preschool Children was that a correlation exists between the behaviors of temperamentally difficult preschool children and the behaviors of creative preschool children. For this study, data on creativity (using Thinking Creatively in Action and Movement) and on temperament (using the Behavioral Style Questionnaire) were collected from a sample group of forty-three children living in an urban Midwest community. Two temperament subcategories, persistence and approach, had moderately significant coefficients when correlated with the overall mean score for creativity