The Creativity–Emotion Connection
“The emotional side of a person is the most important thing in their work.”
Whether you’re frustrated while coming up with a new recipe in the kitchen or excited while solving a problem at work, emotions and creativity play a central role in our lives. But what is the relationship between emotions and creativity? How do our emotions shape the way we think and the ideas we come up with? Imagine you're having a tough day at work. You're feeling stressed, and overwhelmed, and as you try to tackle a difficult project, you find yourself struggling to come up with new ideas and solutions. Now, imagine the same situation, but with a slightly different emotional state. You're still facing the same challenges at work, but this time, you're feeling energized, focused, and positive. You're able to approach the project with a more open and flexible mindset, and you find that new ideas and solutions start to flow more easily.
This simple example illustrates the powerful influence that emotions can have on our creative thinking. When we're feeling positive and engaged, we're more likely to be open to new ideas and perspectives, and more successful in solving problems and making decisions. When we're feeling negative and stressed, on the other hand, our thinking tends to become more narrow and rigid, which can inhibit our creativity. Now let’s delve deeper into the psychology of emotions and creativity, examining the ways in which emotions shape our cognitive processes and look at several key theories and studies that have helped to shed light on this complex relationship.
One of the earliest and most influential theories of the role of emotions in cognition is Simon's 1967 paper, Motivational and Emotional Controls of Cognition. Simon argues that emotions regulate cognitive processes, influencing the way we attend to and process information. According to Simon, emotions serve as "signals" that draw our attention to certain aspects of our environment and help us prioritize information based on its relevance to our goals and needs. This is especially important when we face complex or ambiguous situations, as emotions can help us filter out distractions and focus on what is most important.
Oatley and Johnson-Laird later built upon these ideas by exploring the ways in which emotions influence our thinking and decision-making processes. They suggest emotions play a central role in shaping our beliefs and attitudes, as they provide us with an "emotional logic" that helps us make sense of the world around us. Emotions also influence how we process and remember information, with positive emotions leading to more expansive and flexible thinking, while negative emotions tend to narrow our focus and lead to more rigid and inflexible thinking. This idea that positive emotions lead to more expansive and flexible thinking was elaborated on in another important theory, the broaden-and-build (BNB) theory of positive emotions, proposed by Barbara Fredrickson in 1998. According to this theory, positive emotions have a "broadening" effect on our thinking and behavior leading us to explore new ideas and possibilities and allowing us to be more open to new experiences. This "broadening" effect is thought to be a key mechanism underlying the relationship between positive emotions and creativity, as it allows us to consider a wider range of options and to be more open to exploring novel and creative ideas. Fredrickson's theory has been supported by a large body of research, which has consistently found that positive emotions are associated with increased creativity, curiosity, openness to new ideas, and social connection.
However, it is not only positive emotions that enhance creativity, in the dual-pathway model of creativity, Bernard Nijstad provides a useful framework for understanding the differing ways in which any activating emotion can enhance creativity. According to this model, there are two pathways toward achieving creativity: a flexibility pathway, which can be enhanced by activated positive mood states, and a persistence pathway which can be enhanced by highly activated negative mood states. The flexibility pathway is thought to be more associated with impulsive, divergent, and spontaneous creativity, while the persistence pathway is thought to be more associated with more reflective, analytical, and convergent creativity, both of which are important.
Each of these theories has spawned large quantities of empirical research testing the relationships between emotions and differing types of creativity, both within the lab and in the real world. Meta-analyses of mood-creativity research repeatedly find that positive emotions tend to have a consistent and beneficial effect on creativity, with especially strong relationships found between divergent thinking and highly activated emotions. Negative emotions tend to have more inconsistent and at times negative effects on creativity, however, this is highly variable depending on the type of creativity measure and whether the negative emotions were highly activated or not.
Studies that have looked beyond divergent and convergent thinking measures at the roles of daily emotional experiences on creativity in everyday life, also find a persistent relationship between people who experience more positive emotions on a daily basis tend to be more creative. While those who experience more negative emotions, tend to be less creative. However, it is possible that this negative effect is partially because people associate creativity with more divergent types of expansive creativity and may not self-report engaging in more converging types of creativity. Given the variety of theoretical models and subsequent empirical studies, we find the relationship between creativity and emotions to be multifaceted, with emotions playing a crucial role in regulating cognitive processes and shaping our creative thinking and even our everyday creative activities. While there is still much to learn about this complex and nuanced relationship, the future of creativity and emotions research looks bright, with many exciting opportunities for further exploration and discovery.
Further Reading
Baas, M., De Dreu, C. K. W., & Nijstad, B. A. (2008). A Meta-Analysis of 25 Years of Mood-Creativity Research: Hedonic Tone, Activation, or Regulatory Focus? Psychological Bulletin, 134(6), 779-806. Fredrickson, B. L. (2004). The Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 359(1449), 1367-1377. Karwowski, M., Lebuda, I., Szumski, G., & Firkowska-Mankiewicz, A. (2017). From Moment-to-Moment to Day-to-Day: Experience Sampling And Diary Investigations in Adults’ Everyday Creativity. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 11(3), 309-324. Nijstad, B. A., De Dreu, C. K. W., Rietzschel, E. F., & Baas, M. (2010). The Dual Pathway to Creativity Model: Creative Ideation as a Function of Flexibility and Persistence. European Review of Social Psychology, 21(1), 34-77. Oatley, K., & Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1987). Towards a Cognitive Theory of Emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 1(1), 29-50. Simon, H. A. (1967). Motivational and Emotional Controls of Cognition. Psychological Review, 74(1), 29.
About the Author
Kaile Smith is a creativity researcher, creative director, and Ph.D. student in New York City. Her research explores the dynamic relationships between creativity, inspiration, emotions, and well-being in everyday life.
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