Creativity and emotion: The impact of anger, fear, excitement, and calmness on creative problem solving

As the world advances and becomes more complex, creativity is desired in many situations, including the workplace. In order to maximize creativity in the workplace, it is important to understand the factors that impact creativity, including affect. When approaching the relationship between creativity and affect, research has treated affect as falling into two categories: positive and negative affect. As a result of the broad classification of affect, the relationship between creativity and affect is unclear. The current study argued that the inconsistencies in the literature are due to the broad classification of affect into positive and negative affect categories. In examining early literature on emotions, it is evident that an emotion such as anger would affect a person differently than an emotion such as fear, but both would be classified as negative affect (Gray, 1971). The current study addressed these issues by examining the influence of four specific emotions (anger, fear, calm, excited) on three critical cognitive processes in creativity (problem construction, idea generation, idea evaluation). Unfortunately, the study did not provide support for any of the hypotheses proposed. Although the hypotheses were not supported, it is argued that the limitations of the study are at fault for this, and that the relationship between specific emotions and the creative cognitive processes creativity should be explored further, utilizing the suggestions for future research provided.