Four experiments indicated that positive affect, induced by means of seeing a few minutes of a comedy film or by means of receiving a small bag of candy, improved performance on two tasks that are generally regarded as requiring creative ingenuity: Duncker's (1945) candle task and M. T. Mednick, S. A. Mednick, and E. V. Mednick's (1964) Remote Associates Test. One condition in which negative affect was induced and two in which subjects engaged in physical exercise (intended to represent atfectless arousal) failed to produce comparable improvements in creative performance. The influence of positive affect on creativity was discussed in terms of a broader theory of the impact of positive affect on cognitive organization. Recent research has suggested that positive affect can influence the way cognitive material is organized and thus may influence creativity. Studies using three types of tasks (typicality rating, sorting, and word association) indicated that persons in whom positive affect had been induced differed from those in control conditions in the associations that they gave to common, neutral words (Isen, Johnson, Mertz, & Robinson, 1985) and in the pattern and degree of relatedness that they depicted among stimulus elements (Isen & Daubman, 1984). It has been suggested that these differences are due to differences between the groups in the tendency to relate and integrate divergent material. This process of bringing together apparently disparate material in a useful or reasonable but unaccustomed way is central to most current conceptualizations of the creative process (e.g., Koestler, 1964; S. A. Mednick, 1962). Thus, it seems likely that positive affect may promote creativity.

Three studies and a pilot experiment showed that positive affect, induced in any of three ways, influenced categorization of either of two types of stimuli-words or colors. As reflected by performance on two types of tasks (rating and sorting), people in whom positive affect had been induced tended to create and use categories more inclusively than did subjects in a control condition. On one task, they tended to group more stimuli together, and on the other task they tended to rate more low-prototypic exemplars of a category as members of the category. These results are interpreted in terms of an influence of affect on cognitive organization or on processes that might influence cognitive organization. It is suggested that borderline effects of negative affect on categorization, obtained in two of the studies, might result from normal people's attempts to cope with negative affect.

This is the first study of unwanted sexual experiences in the collegiate "hooking-up" culture. In a representative sample of 178 students at a small liberal arts university. Twenty-three percent of women and 7% of men surveyed reported one or more experiences of unwanted sexual intercourse. Seventy-eight percent of unwanted vaginal, anal, and oral incidents took place while--"hooking up,"--whereas 78% of unwanted fondling incidents occurred at parties or bars. The most frequently endorsed reason for unwanted sexual intercourse was impaired judgment due to alcohol. The most frequently endorsed reason for unwanted fondling was that it happened before the perpetrator could be stopped. Of those affected by unwanted sexual intercourse or unwanted fondling, 46.7% and 19.2% reported unwanted memories, 50% and 32.7% reported avoidance and numbing responses, and 30% and 26.9% reported hyperarousal responses, respectively. A preliminary model of unwanted sex and collegiate social dynamics is proposed to provide a heuristic for further research.

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