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A Meta-Analysis of 25 Years of Mood-Creativity Research: Hedonic Tone, Activation, or Regulatory Focus?

November 2008
Psychological Bulletin 134(6):779-806

DOI:10.1037/a0012815

Source
PubMed

Authors:

Matthijs Baas

University of Amsterdam

Carsten K W De Dreu

Leiden University

Bernard A Nijstad

University of Groningen

This meta-analysis synthesized 102 effect sizes reflecting the relation between specific moods and creativity. Effect sizes overall revealed that positive moods produce more creativity than mood-neutral controls (r= .15), but no significant differences between negative moods and mood-neutral controls (r= -.03) or between positive and negative moods (r= .04) were observed. Creativity is enhanced most by positive mood states that are activating and associated with an approach motivation and promotion focus (e.g., happiness), rather than those that are deactivating and associated with an avoidance motivation and prevention focus (e.g., relaxed). Negative, deactivating moods with an approach motivation and a promotion focus (e.g., sadness) were not associated with creativity, but negative, activating moods with an avoidance motivation and a prevention focus (fear, anxiety) were associated with lower creativity, especially when assessed as cognitive flexibility. With a few exceptions, these results generalized across experimental and correlational designs, populations (students vs. general adult population), and facet of creativity (e.g., fluency, flexibility, originality, eureka/insight). The authors discuss theoretical implications and highlight avenues for future research on specific moods, creativity, and their relationships.

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A Meta-Analysis of 25 Years of Mood–Creativity Research:

Hedonic Tone, Activation, or Regulatory Focus?

Matthijs Baas, Carsten K. W. De Dreu, and Bernard A. Nijstad

University of Amsterdam

This meta-analysis synthesized 102 effect sizes reflecting the relation between specific moods and

creativity. Effect sizes overall revealed that positive moods produce more creativity than mood-neutral

controls (r⫽.15), but no significant differences between negative moods and mood-neutral controls

(r⫽⫺.03) or between positive and negative moods (r⫽.04) were observed. Creativity is enhanced most

by positive mood states that are activating and associated with an approach motivation and promotion

focus (e.g., happiness), rather than those that are deactivating and associated with an avoidance

motivation and prevention focus (e.g., relaxed). Negative, deactivating moods with an approach moti-

vation and a promotion focus (e.g., sadness) were not associated with creativity, but negative, activating

moods with an avoidance motivation and a prevention focus (fear, anxiety) were associated with lower

creativity, especially when assessed as cognitive flexibility. With a few exceptions, these results

generalized across experimental and correlational designs, populations (students vs. general adult

population), and facet of creativity (e.g., fluency, flexibility, originality, eureka/insight). The authors

discuss theoretical implications and highlight avenues for future research on specific moods, creativity,

and their relationships.

Keywords: mood, creativity, regulatory focus, hedonic tone, level of activation

Supplemental materials: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0012815.supp

“The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the

place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a

passing shape, from a spider’s web.”

—Picasso, quoted in Christian Zervos, Conversation avec Picasso

[Conversation with Picasso]

“Feeling and longing are the motive forces behind all human endeavor

and human creations.”

—Albert Einstein, Religion and Science

To survive, people need to adapt to changing circumstances. To

prosper, people need to solve problems, generate new insights, and

create new products and services. Put differently, critical to both

survival and prosperity is creativity—the creation of something

new and unusual meant to improve one’s effective functioning

(Amabile, 1983; Eysenck, 1993; Runco, 2004; Simonton, 2003).

Accordingly, creativity has been studied in the psychological sci-

ences for decades, most notably since Guilford’s (1950) address to

the American Psychological Association, in which he pleaded for

the systematic study of creativity within psychology. Creativity

research now has its own place within most of the traditional

sub-areas in psychology, including social, organizational, person-

ality, cognitive, clinical, and child psychology.

Within these different sub-areas, mood stands out as one of the

most widely studied and least disputed predictors of creativity

(e.g., Isen & Baron, 1991; Mumford, 2003). The popularity of

mood as a predictor of creativity is partly due to the fact that mood

often serves as an intermediary state between a host of situational

and personality predictors, on the one hand, and creative perfor-

mance, on the other. Thus, once we understand how mood relates

to creativity, we may infer from the ways in which leadership

influences employee mood how leadership relates to employee

creativity (e.g., George & Zhou, 2002). Likewise, from the ways in

which group conflict influences individual moods, we may infer

how conflict relates to group creativity (e.g., Carnevale & Probst,

1998; De Dreu & Nijstad, in press). Additionally, from the way

preliminary task performance shapes emotion states, we may infer

how such task performance relates to creative performance on a

subsequent task (e.g., Madjar & Oldham, 2002).

In general, the mood– creativity literature breaks down into three

separate, yet interrelated, lines of inquiry. First, there is a large amount

of work comparing positive moods with affect-neutral control condi-

tions. In summarizing this line of work, Ashby, Isen, and Turken

(1999) concluded “It is now well recognized that positive affect leads

to greater cognitive flexibility and facilitates creative problem solving

across a broad range of settings” (p. 530). In a similar vein, Lyubomir-

sky, King, and Diener (2005) stated,

People in a positive mood are more likely to have richer associations

within existing knowledge structures, and thus are likely to be more

flexible and original. Those in a good mood will excel when the task

is complex and past learning can be used in a heuristic way to more

efficiently solve the task or when creativity and flexibility are re-

quired. (p. 840)

Matthijs Baas, Carsten K. W. De Dreu, and Bernard A. Nijstad, Department

of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Matthijs

Baas, Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Roetersstraat

15, 1018 WB, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. E-mail: m.baas@uva.nl

2008, Vol. 134, No. 6, 779– 806 0033-2909/08/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0012815

779

This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.

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