The Emotional Effect Of The Prototype Elicitation In Creative Problem Solving

There are different results of the emotional effect on creativity, forming two opposite theory, "promotion hypothesis" and "inhibition hypothesis." The former theory goes that the positive emotion can promote the role of creativity and the negative emotion on the other hand. "Inhibition hypothesis" thinks that positive emotion has the inhibitory action and the negative emotion promote creativity. So it's necessary to carry on more related research.This research takes the prototype elicitation theory in creative problem solving as a foundation, the items from "Science Invention and Creation Experimental Material Question Storehouse" as the experimental material, detects how the emotion effect the prototype elicitation. The study includes three experiments. In the first one,32 items from the "Question Storehouse" are chosen to be the experimental material. The experiment follows the paradigm of "learning-test", evoking emotion at the stage of "learning", with emotional valence (positive, negative or neutral) and emotional arouse (highly or moderately) as independent variables and problem solving accuracy and response time as dependent variable. This research discusses that the emotional representation at learning stage affects the accuracy of problem solving. The second experiment also follows the "learning-test" paradigm, evoking different emotions at the "test" stage, making whole testing phase in certain emotional background in order to discuss the effect of emotional background on the prototype elicitation. Different emotions are induced by means of the Chinese Affective Pictures System (CAPS). Each trial has a certain picture, namely presenting an emotional picture then to carry on the test question together. The third experiment adopts the event related potential (ERP) technology, exploring the brain mechanism of influence which different emotional representation (intense emotion or moderate emotion) affect prototype elicitation at the stage of learning. The experimental material is the 60 items from "Science Invention and Creation Experimental Material Question Storehouse", but they are simplified by the number of words under the retention original intention's premise. Regardless of the prototype or the question are simplified in 14 characters, guaranteeing that they are be able to spell over in the shortest time and no eye moving.The result discovered that in the learning phase the positive mood has promoter action to the creative question solution and negative emotion has the inhibitory action. The arousal deviants (high or moderate) have no noticeable difference. At the stage of question solution, positive emotion has not remarkable promoter action, but negative mood has the remarkable inhibitory action. And the highly negative mood has more remarkable inhibitory action than moderately negative. Moreover, after the analysis of ERP, we found that under the neutral condition's ERP wave amplitude is the biggest, the moderately negative condition is the second, highly negative condition's wave is lowest.