The effects of creativity training on creativity performances, executive functions, and emotion regulation skills in preschool children

The purpose of this study is to develop a program that enhances the creativity of the preschoolers and also to analyze the dimensions of self-regulation, which are executive functions and emotion regulation. Participants consisted of a group of 80 pre-school age (4-5) children. The training group was given creativity training based on imagination and pretend play. Control group was given no training. Two tests were used for the rating of creativity, as for the pre-test Alternate Uses Task and for post-test Instances Task. Executive functions were rated with Day-Night Task and Standard Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS) Task for the pre-test, and Grass-Snow Task, Head-Toes-Shoulders-Knees (HTSK) Task for the post-test. Emotion regulation on the other hand was rated with, both for the pre-test and for the post-test, Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC). Another way of rating the emotion regulation was Gift Waiting-1 Task for the pre-test and Gift Waiting-2 Task for the post-test. Linguistic skills was determined to be the control variable and was measured with Test of Early Language Development for Turkish children. Analyzing the results; t-Tests, Mann Whitney U and Wilcoxon Sign-Rank Test, for the mixed model repeated measures ANOVA and ANCOVA were used. Results showed that the creativity and TEC scores of the children were higher after the program. Between the Standard DCCS Task and HTSK Task, scores were higher after the program. Keywords: creativity, self-regulation, executive functions, emotion regulation