This is My Fairy Tale: How Emotional Intelligence Interacts with a Training Intervention in Enhancing Children's Creative Potential

Creative potential is a set of multidimensional resources concerning the latent ability to produce original and adaptive work. Confluent theoretical models, in particular, stated that, in order to express creative potential in an effective way, resources should converge and interact efficiently. Within such a confluent framework, the present study explored whether the increase in specific cognitive resources defining creative potential during childhood, as induced through a newly developed training intervention based on the creation of fairy tales, could be affected by another constitutional dimension, that is, children’s emotional resources and, in particular, their trait emotional intelligence (EI). A total of 410 children from 3rd to 5th grade of primary school was involved in the study, equally divided in a training group and in a control group. Results showed that the fairy tale–based training protocol was effective in increasing children’s creative potential. More importantly, results showed that the training intervention was particularly effective in increasing the ability to generate original contents in children with low-to-medium trait EI levels. These findings showed that emotional intelligence is a central factor to be considered when exploring the efficacy of a training intervention aimed at increasing children’s creative potential.