From musician to a multi-creative achiever: A survey study on the relationship of music training, creative self-regulation, and family support with creative achievement across domains

Eminent musicians like Paul McCartney and Brian May are often accomplished multi-creative achieversin diverse domains, suggesting that music training may foster multi-creativity in areas such as art andscience. We propose that acquiring creative self-regulation skills is key for (multi)creative achievement.Previous studies indicate that long-term music training enhances self-regulation, as learners mustcontrol their emotions, behaviors, and cognition. Family support, in turn, might increase music learners’awareness of these skills and moderate their transfer to other creative fields. To explore theseconjectured relationships, we conducted a survey study (n = 402) in a student sample. Contrary to ourexpectations, we found no relationship between the amount of music training, creative self-regulationand (multi)creative achievement. Surprisingly, family support had a negative moderating effect on therelationship between (the quantity, frequency and level) of music training and creative self-regulation.However, latent correlations revealed that positive family relationships were linked to greater self-reflection and creative achievement. Lastly, our study showed that certain aspects of creative self-regulation such as self-reflection negatively mediated the relationship between music training andcreative achievement. We speculate that focusing primarily on the quantity of music training may haveconcealed other qualitative aspects of participants' experiences. Our findings suggest the need forfuture research to examine the effects of specific self-regulation sub-constructs on different creativedomains, considering various styles of family support and music training. This study highlights anunderstudied area with the potential to reveal how creative skills transfer across domains.