Psychodynamic assumptions that unpleasant and new content can stimulate creativity have been partially confirmed by empirical research. However, it is questionable, in which way the familiarity of content, the particular dimensions of the emotional experience and the qualities of emotions affect the production of highly creative individuals such as art students, and whether their creative process shows a certain level of peculiarity. In this research, the degree and type of correlations between the creativity of the response, and the qualities of emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust), the dimensions of the emotional experience (valence and arousal) and the familiarity of content were examined with different student populations. The experiment was performed with 59 students, and 40 photos were selected for visual stimulation, so that the values of the dimensions and qualities of the emotional experience were systematically varied. Students were exposed to the photos and were asked to rate the familiarity of their content, and subsequently to make the most creative title for each of them. The creativity of the titles was measured by coefficients of creativity and uniqueness, based on the originality assessment. The results confirm the statistical significance of moderate negative correlations between creativity and familiarity of content, valence, and happiness; moderate positive correlations between creativity and arousal, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust, as well as process specificities of the art students, for whom novelty and surprise take the lead over other qualities and dimensions of emotional experience.

creativity, primary emotions, familiarity of content, dimensions of emotional experience, artistic production