DOMINIC W. MASSARO, editor
University of California, Santa Cruz

Are Developmental Psychologists Ready for This Creative Development?

Creativity and Development
By R. Keith Sawyer, Vera John-Steiner, Seana Moran, Robert J. Sternberg, David Henry Feldman, Jeanne Nakamura, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. x + 244 pp. Paper, $24.95.

The two key words creativity and development are not found together very often in mainstream psychological research. The rare co-occurrence becomes immediately apparent if one conducts a search through an electronic database such as PsycINFO. For example, the premier journal Developmental Psychology has not published an article on the subject of creativity since 1991, and before that the last article explicitly devoted to creativity appeared more than a decade earlier. Child Development, another top-tier journal, has not published anything specifically regarding creativity for more than 20 years. Looking at the results from the other end of the developmental spectrum, Psychology and Aging last published an article on creativity in 1990. Furthermore, the early pioneers in developmental psychology, whether G. Stanley Hall or Jean Piaget, seem to have had little interest in creativity as a phenomenon. Indeed, most of the key figures in the area of creativity appear to be not developmental psychologists but rather researchers in differential, educational, and organizational psychology.