The impact of positive thinking skills on creativity in the first-year High School Female Students

Psychologists believe that negative thoughts and emotions can greatly limit our thoughts, actions, and creativity, while positive and thoughts result in the expansion of our actions. Positive thoughts and positive emotions (happiness and joy) direct our mindsets toward curiosity and creativity. Nowadays, a great number of psychologists believe that creativity can be developed by education. This study investigated the impact of positive thinking skills on the first-year high school female students’ creativity and creativity elements (flexibility, fluency, originality and elaboration). Two groups, consisting of 34 students, were chosen using multi-stage cluster sampling from among the first year high school female students of a high school affiliated with Educational Department District 5 in Tehran. The participants were randomly assigned into two groups, control group and experimental group. First, Creativity Test (Abdei, 1995) was administered for both groups. Then, the experimental group was taught positive thinking skills in 10 sessions. Upon completion of instruction, Abdei (1995) Creativity Test was re-administered to both groups. Data analysis was accomplished using Analysis of Variance. The results confirmed the significant positive effects of positive thinking skills on the participants’ creativity and creativity elements (flexibility, fluency, originality and elaboration). Accordingly, we can conclude that teaching positive thinking skills can enhance the students’ creativity.