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Abstract Identifying ways to enable people to reach their creative potential is a core goal of creativity research with implications for education and professional attainment. Recently, we identified a potential barrier to creative achievement: creativity anxiety (i.e., anxiety specific to creative thinking). Initial work found that creativity anxiety is associated with fewer real-world creative achievements. However, the more proximal impacts of creativity anxiety remain unexplored. In particular, understanding how to overcome creativity anxiety requires understanding how creativity anxiety may or may not impact creative cognitive performance, and how it may relate to state-level anxiety and effort while completing creative tasks. The present study sought to address this gap by measuring creativity anxiety alongside several measures of creative performance, while concurrently surveying state-level anxiety and effort. Results indicated that creativity anxiety was, indeed, predictive of poor creative performance, but only on some of the tasks included. We also found that creativity anxiety predicted both state anxiety and effort during creative performance. Interestingly, state anxiety and effort did not explain the associations between creativity anxiety and creative performance. Together, this work suggests that creativity anxiety can often be overcome in the performance of creative tasks, but likewise points to increased state anxiety and effort as factors that may make creative performance and achievement fragile in more demanding real-world contexts. 

Relational reasoning is a complex form of human cognition involving the evaluation of relations between mental representations of information. Prior studies have modified stimulus properties of relational reasoning problems and examined differences in difficulty between different problem types. While subsets of these stimulus properties have been addressed in separate studies, there has not been a comprehensive study, to our knowledge, which investigates all of these properties in the same set of stimuli. This investigative gap has resulted in different findings across studies which vary in task design, making it challenging to determine what stimulus properties make relational reasoning—and the putative formation of mental models underlying reasoning—difficult. In this article, we present the Multidimensional Relational Reasoning Task (MRRT), a task which systematically varied an array of stimulus properties within a single set of relational reasoning problems. Using a mixed-effects framework, we demonstrate that reasoning problems containing a greater number of the premises as well as multidimensional relations led to greater task difficulty. The MRRT has been made publicly available for use in future research, along with normative data regarding the relative difficulty of each problem.