Why Does Creativity Foster Well-Being? Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness During Everyday Creative Activities

The study of creativity in daily life explores creativity as it happens in people’s unique environments. A consistent finding in this small literature is that engaging in creative activities predicts greater positive emotions, particularly for activated, energetic positive states. To understand why creative activity in everyday life might foster well-being, we turned to self-determination theory’s (SDT) organismic needs—autonomy, competence, and relatedness—and the classic diary research that found that “good days” were days in which these needs were satisfied. To explore the mediating role of these three core needs, we conducted a seven-day experience sampling study of 125 university students, many of whom were majoring in creative fields. We asked if they were working on something creative along with questions about their current emotional state and experience of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. At the within-person level, we found that all three needs significantly mediated the effect of doing something creative on the experience of increased positive emotion as well as reduced negative emotion. Taken together, the findings suggest that SDT is a fruitful framework to understand how creativity promotes well-being in everyday life.