Articles:Positive affect facilitates creative problem solving

From unthinkMedia

This articles looks are 4 studies involving positive affect promoting creativity.

research questions

The research questions are

  • investigating whether positive affect promotes creativity
  • extending the evidence beyond that available in the word association and categorization studies

Results

The results of these studies show that positive affect could facilitate creativity. In the studies, the author found that the stimuli could be subtle to induce positive affect. In these studies they used a comedic film and candy.

  • Study one found that it does not appear that arousal alone is sufficient to result in creativity
  • in study 2, negative affect groups score substantially lower. The conclusion is that has very little positive and negative effect.
  • Study 3 indicated that positive affect induced by means of a small gift could facilitate creativity as indicated by performance on the Remote Associates Test
  • Study 4 suggest we shouldn't think of positive affect as reducing cognitive capacity or as, for some other reason, leading to lazy and inefficient problem solving.
    1. increased use of heuristics
    2. more rapid decision making
    3. broadened categorization among positive affect subjects
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