A Test Of Group Incubation In Creativity Study Field And The Exploration Of Its Underlying Mechanisms

The incubation effect has been widely studied as a concept drawing much attention in creativity study field. However, among these studies there are seldom ones using groups as subject units. Based on the situation, the present study designed a series of experiments to explore incubation effect in small groups. The purpose of the study is to confirm whether group incubation exists, to explore factors affect it and to look for the underlying mechanism. All experiments of the study used dyads as subjects to avoid uncontrollable factors possibly bring by the increasing of group size, and also the generalization difficulty caused by different group sizes among experiments.The present study contained four experiments. Experiment 1 was aimed to verify whether there is a group incubation effect. By contracting performances on target task under incubation condition and non-incubation condition, it was found that a group incubation effect appeared. Experiment 2 was designed to explore the effect of emotion on group incubation. The comparison between positive condition, negative condition and non-incubation condition showed a beneficial effect of negative emotion on group incubation. Experiment 3 was going to check the effect of interpolated task type on group incubation. A convergent task and a divergent task were used. The results showed that a divergent task during incubation period is related to a larger group incubation. Experiment 4 used an un-creative task as target task to see whether group incubation also exists. And it also examined the effect of interpolated task types on group incubation. Using a verbal task and a spatial task, experiment 4 finally showed that there is a significant group incubation effect after controlling the covariate GPS and Openness. By the way, all the four experiments got a significant main effect of fluency, which showed that fluency on stage 1 is higher than that in stage 2.Basing the results above, several conclusions were got:there is a group incubation effect; there may be different underlying mechanism which can explain group incubation effect, and when is which is due to the situation; group incubation effect also exists in an un-creative task; factors coming from groups like familiarity of group members, extent of group members’openness; group potential index of group members and group sex made-up may have some effect on group incubation.