CONTROLLED ANXIETY IN THE ACADEMIC ENVIRONMENT AS AN STIMULUS FOR STUDENTS' CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION

Stress is a natural human condition, producing a response that prompts individuals to deal with challenges and threats in their lives. The degree to which they experience stress varies and is a projection of multifactorial relationships between personality characteristics, the type and complexity of the stressor, and specific dimensions of the environment. For this reason, researchers still do not have a unified position regarding the impact of stress on cognitive and behavioral processes and their applied dimensions in everyday life. In 2022, a team from Ruse University conducted a social experiment to establish the influence of the psycho-physiological factor of anxiety on the creativity and innovation of human resources by observing seven focus groups in a stressful work environment. One of the researched groups of respondents are students from all majors and courses of the University of Ruse, and the study of this group focuses on defining the effect of anxiety as a projection of stress on students' creativity and innovation in a controlled academic environment with stressors. The obtained results show a minor change in creativity values in the group of students. It follows that anxiety cannot be identified as a factor that generates changes in their creativity levels.