Exploring a tripartite relationship between rebelliousness, openness to experience and creativity

Sixty-seven undergraduates completed the NEO-Personality Inventory (Costa & McCrae, 1985), the Rebelliousness Questionnaire (McDermott, 1987), and an author-devised creativity checklist. Reactive rebelliousness correlated positively with NEO-neurotic hostility and negatively with NEO-openness to experience subscales but not with frequency of self-reported creative interests and activities. A disaggregated measure of creative activities however, demonstrated a positive association between number of creative literary acts and proactive rebelliousness scores. All 6 NEO-openness subscales correlated positively with self-reported creative activities; 5 did so with creative interests. Specifically, openness to fantasy and openness to aesthetic experience correlated notably with creative activities and interests. Thus, openness, as McCrae & Costa (1985) hypothesized, was highly predictive of self-reported creative acts and interests.