When Emotion Meets Thinking
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The intriguing finding was that creativity did not depend only on emotion (happy or sad), or only on the thinking mode (big-picture or detailed) that participants were in. Creativity depended on the combination of participants’ detail mindset and their mood.
Participants who were first primed to be in a “big picture” frame of mind (looking for the bigger configuration in the letters) and were also encouraged to be in a positive mood (rather than a sad mood) were more creative in the uses of a brick task. They were also more insightful problem-solvers and more broad and flexible categorizers. They saw the “not-typical” members of the categories as more strongly belonging to the category than did participants who were primed to be in a “big picture” frame of mind but encouraged to be in a sad mood.
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