Genre variety as indicator of creativity in TAT stories of musicians and visual artists

Objectives. The goal of this qualitative study is to show the latent potential of the Thematic-Apperception Test in the context of creativity research. The secondary objective is to capture possible differences in the area of creativity and personality of various groups of artists. Sample and settings. The target group was various artists. Thirty artists were divided into three groups according to the type of art and educational attainment. The first group consists of musicians with formal musical education, the second one consists of self-taught musicians and the third group is the most diverse, created by various visual artists. All the members of the third group also have formal education in their field. Analysis. The starting point of this qualitative oriented research is 300 stories created on the basis of TAT, which was openly presented to the participants as a creativity test. Their stories were then further explored to capture and identify characteristics that may indicate the author’s creativity. One manifestation was the variety of genres used by the narrator in a single TAT protocol. Genre analysis of the stories revealed differences in their occurrence among the groups. Results. Visual artists more often created abstract narratives, frequently extending far into the realm of bizarreness. It also seems that autodidact musicians tend to create tragedy-oriented stories and lean towards positive genres only rarely. Limitations. The selection of participants did not avoid certain weaknesses. Part of the sample is made up of participants whom we know in person and only during the collection of data we switched to snowball sampling. The entire research group is also made up of Slovak artists, so all the stories were created in the Slovak language. Many language-specific metaphorical expressions and linguistic nuances related to creativity which are unique to each language and thus would be lost in translation.