Creativity Buffers the Impact of COVID-19 on Pandemic-Related Stress

This study examined the buffering impact of appreciation for creative personality, creative achievement, and creative ability on COVID-19-affected pandemic-related stress and resiliency outcomes in adults in the United States. Participants were invited to partake in an online survey, which was conducted on Amazon MTurk using a structured questionnaire. After cleaning the data, a final sample of 358 participants was used for correlational and moderated mediation analyses. The results demonstrated that COVID-19-related stress was significantly and negatively associated with creative personality and ability and positively associated with creative achievement. All three proposed mediators demonstrated indirect effects that had confidence intervals that did not include zero and mediated the effect of COVID-19 on stress. Creative achievement mediated the effect of COVID-19 on resiliency, while creative ability mediated the effect of COVID-19 on positive changes. Creative skills may be an avenue for decreased stress after collective trauma. Creative achievement is related to increased resilience, but it is also tied to increased stress. Overall, this study makes a strong case for enhancing creativity for developing internal strength to soften the impact of powerful sustained stressors such as the COVID pandemic.