The results were inconsistent with the study’s hypothesis that the absence of time constraint awareness would negatively affect participants’ creativity performance. On the contrary, the experimental condition participants who were explicitly informed of a time limit performed better with a higher mean of test scores than control condition participants. There are a number of reasons which could account for such outcome. Firstly, a small sample size which was made up of university students who were frequently exposed to time-limited course assessments such as midterm and final exams with goals to achieve good grades may have effectively predisposed student participants to perform better in test-anxiety-inducing situations. The finding that a greater percentage of experimental condition participants reported that they were anxious during the study’s test raises the question of whether test anxiety could enhance creative performance. A study by Baas, De Dreu, and Nijstad (2011) proposed that anxiety which resulted from persistence in pursuing prevention-focused goals, as opposed to a state of relief and/or relaxation from closure of goals fulfilled by successfully evading an unpleasant consequence, could promote similar levels of creativity as promotion-focused cues. Their hypothesis was supported by the study’s results as prevention-focused participants’ performed similarly as well on an insight problem-solving test as promotion-focused participants when the absence of closure of goals did not produce a state of deactivation in regulatory focus and mood. The authors argued that the closure of positive goal pursuits under a promotion orientation would still continue to maintain an enhanced activation in mood, which is associated with increased creativity, whereas the outcome is opposite with closure of prevention-focused goals, leading to reduced activation brought about by relief and security. This helps explain the plausibility of highly-stimulating test anxiety being a positive motivating factor of creativity under a prevention-focused condition.
In addition to the factor of possible anxiety-induced activation of persistent unfulfilled goal pursuit contributing to comparable creativity performance by both groups of participants, there are limitations in the study’s design which could have accounted for the ceiling effect produced by a weak independent variable. Firstly, the creativity test was made up of one question which asked for a list of similarities between a dog and a man. It could have been an easy task for university students who were in a psychology research methods class. The awareness of time constraint may not have been induced strongly with just a printed reminder on the test question sheet. A stronger manipulation could be utilizing a timer which produces an audible sound effect at certain intervals over the course of the test duration or to have the experimenter verbally reminding the time limit. Secondly, while a short test duration of one minute has been sufficient to create an anxiety-inducing time pressure event for experimental participants, it may not have been long enough to generate above-average positive valence of emotions commonly associated with higher level of creativity. In investigating the effect of time constraints on participants’ statistics test anxiety and performance, Onwuegbuzie and Seaman (2010) discovered that participants from both high and low anxiety groups performed better when they were told that they have unlimited time to complete the test. An explicit statement of unlimited test duration would not be possible and realistic for the unspecified time constraint condition when our research course only permit a maximum experiment duration of 5 minutes and thus sets a limitation for this study. Thirdly, in addition to generating less test anxiety, the time constraint unspecified control condition could have easily led participants to procrastinate due to uninformed test expectation and emotional relief with a lack of motivation to expend cognitive effort to perform well. This also suggested that the reduced activation of regulatory focus and state of mood, whether it is promotion or prevention focused, could decrease one’s creative performance.
In consideration of the above factors which could have affected the outcome of this study and an explanation for the positive effect of test anxiety on time constraint informed participants’ performance, it can be concluded that for a simple and short duration test on creativity, the impact of time constraint awareness on participants’ performance is minimally positive. The degree of such impact could also be moderated by the state of one’s activated mood and whether one is motivated to be promotion or prevention focused. Nevertheless, based on the proposed curvilinear relationship between stress and performance, it is questionable whether a higher level of anxiety being activated during a creativity test would produce a similar positive effect on performance (Baas, De Dreu, & Nijstad, 2011; De Dreu, Baas, & Nijstad, 2008). Future research should also look into the effect of long duration anxiety on creativity levels and how well such findings could generalize to real-life university course assessment systems.