Positive affect facilitates creative problem solving.

Abstract

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.

Encouraging the perceptual underdog: Positive affective priming of nonpreferred local–global processes.

“…Rather, the results were congruent with the conclusion of Isen et al (1987) that negative moods do not necessarily impair creativity (and hence processing flexibility). Indeed, there was a Encouraging 17 non-significant tendency for negative primes to promote flexibility, just as positive primes did.…”

Positive activities as protective factors against mental health conditions.

“…Notably, the positive emotions stimulated by positive activities can help people to creatively solve the problems they might be ruminating about (Isen, Daubman, & Nowicki, 1987) …”

Will you be there for me when things go right? Supportive responses to positive event disclosures.

“…Fredrickson's (1998Fredrickson's ( , 2001) broaden-andbuild functional model of positive emotions posits that positive emotions broaden an individual's scope of cognition, attention, and action and build the individual's physical, intellectual, and social resources. Isen and colleagues' (Isen & Daubman, 1984;Isen, Daubman, & Nowicki, 1987) research provided early evidence for the broadening aspects of positive emotions such that induced positive emotions led to more flexible and creative processing. More recently, Fredrickson and Joiner (2002) found that broader and more flexible coping was associated with increased positive emotional experiences.…”