ENHANCING CREATIVITY AND MULTICULTURAL COMPETENCY IN COUNSELLING PSYCHOLOGY GRADUATE PROGRAMS

Back to Page Authors: Katrina Monton, Emily Matejko, Sasha van Frank-Adler

Keywords: multicultural competency skills, education, creativity, counselling psychology, functional learning experiences, idea fluency

Abstract: Research has found multicultural experiences enhance creativity on problem solving tasks (Maddux, Adam, & Galinsky, 2010; Lu, Hafenbrack, Eastwick, Wang, Maddux, & Galinsky, 2017; Chua, 2018). This relationship can be explained by functional learning (learning the reasons why you are doing something in a new culture) which is critical for creativity enhancement (Maddux & Galinsky, 2009; Maddux et al., 2010). Previous literature has not applied this research to mental health clinicians. Rigid thinking is associated with inflexibility, and less creativity (Gaither, Remedios, Sanchez, & Sommers, 2015). In order for clinicians to meet the needs of culturally diverse clients, they should avoid rigid stereotypic thinking and be creative in their use of integrating cross-cultural research into practice (Stuart, 2004). The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of priming positive and neutral local functional learning experiences (LFLE) on creativity and problem solving tasks in mental health clinicians. Creativity is examined in terms of functional fixedness and idea fluency (Ritter et al., 2012; Steffens et al. 2016). This research proposal aims to expand creativity research by examining how priming LFLE may enhance creativity in problem solving. Importantly, such research would also determine whether enhanced creativity is associated with improvements in clinicians’ multicultural counselling competencies (MCC) with clients. These findings could guide the restructuring of graduate programs and courses aimed at enhancing clinician MCC. Increasing MCCs could ultimately empower clinicians and foster the development of critical skills that would allow clinicians to support clients from diverse cultural backgrounds.