Neural Mechanisms Of The Impact Of Social Attitudes On Generation Of Creative Ideas

The creativity is an advanced cognitive process and the main power to promote the development of human society,its result is to produce novel and valuable products,and novelty is the key feature of the creative process.In the early stages of creative research,It mainly revealed the difference of individual creativity and the causes of these difference;Recently,creative research mainly explores the various factors that affect individual creative performance,the source of factors can be divided into individual factors and social factors,individual factors mainly refers to personality traits of individual,such as intelligence,motivation and cognitive style,social factors are mostly about the reward,evaluation and feedback etc.Social attitudes is a kind of typical external social factors which influence creativity,it mainly refers to the quality evaluation orientation for social objects,it is also a state of psychological preparation,and it has great important influence on human psychology and behavior.Social attitudes which is emphasized by this research is from the outside world(society or others),namely to give positive or negative social attitude evaluation to individual's creative ideas how to influence the subsequent creative ideas generation and neural mechanisms.In experiment 1,we use behavioral study methods to probe three different kinds of social attitude evaluation(positive social attitudes,neutral social attitudes and negative social attitude)on the impact of individual's creative ideas generation.The experiment is the single factor experimental design,experimental task is the alternative uses tasks(AUT),the dependent variable is the novelty of use of object.Experimental results showed that under the condition of positive social attitudes,the novelty of use of object(M = 3.106,SE = 3.106)was significantly higher than neutral social attitude condition(M = 2.553,SE = 2.553),p < 0.001;under the condition of negative social attitude,the novelty of use of object(M = 3.033,SE = 3.033)was significantly higher than neutral social attitude condition(M = 2.553,SE = 2.553),p < 0.001;In addition,we also found that under the condition of positive social attitudes,the novelty of use of object(M = 3.106,SE = 3.106)was significantly higher than negative social attitude condition(M = 3.033,SE = 3.033),p < 0.05).Therefore,we concludes that socialattitudes have influence on creative ideas generation,positive social attitude is more advantageous to promote the generation of creative ideas.We believe that giving affirmation,appreciation and support social attitude evaluation to creative idea of individual can trigger the individual's positive emotion,the previous study found that positive emotions colud improve cognitive flexibility,and cognitive flexibility was positively correlated with novelty.positive emotions could also promote semantic automatic diffusion of the concept and easily set up a remote connection,an previous study found that the distant distance on the mental representation could promote the generation of creative ideas.Negative social attitude could also promote the generation of creative ideas.We believe that giving contempt,negation,and against social attitude evaluation to creative idea of individual can trigger the individual's negative emotional state,the study found that individuals in a state of negative emotional state may occupy more attention resources,suppress the existing concept or ideas extraction,which was beneficial to the formation of independent concepts or contact,thus it maybe promote the generation of creative ideas;In addition,we believe that giving contempt,negation,and against attitude evaluation to creative idea of individual may make individual feel not supported and recognized,as Lewis(2000)pointed out that an individual's evaluation to the outside world will be carried out in the cognitive,emotional and motive significance two forms of psychological processing,if the evaluation result is in line with their own expectation,they will feel happy and keep this kind of behavior,or feel frustrated,and immediately adjust their behavior.Therefore,we argue that this kind of negative social attitude evaluation could make individuals feel depressed,which will cause individual a strong inner drive to do better,which will help individual to produce more free-flowing ideas.In order to test the brain neural activity of creative ideas generation of different social attitudes conditions,in experiment 2,we have adopted high spatial resolution of functional magnetic resonance imaging(f MRI)to compare the three kinds of experimental conditions(positive social attitudes,neutral social attitudes and negative social attitude)impact neural mechanisms of creative ideas generation.The f MRI results showed that compared with neutral condition of social attitude,under the condition of positive social attitude,the generation of creative idea is mainly related to inferior frontal gyrus(BA 47)and posterior cingulate cortex(PCC)etc;Compared with neutral condition of social attitude,under the condition of negative social attitude,the generation of creative idea is mainly related to inferior frontal gyrus(BA 47)and middleof the cingulate cortex etc;The most important finding is that relative to the condition of negative social attitude,under the condition of positive social attitude,the generation of creative idea is mainly related to the left hemisphere inferior frontal gyrus(BA 47),posterior cingulate cortex(PCC)etc.Studies have shown that inferior frontal gyrus(BA47)is mainly responsible for producing novelty ideas in creative process and setting up semantic connection over a long distance;Cingulate gyrus is mainly responsible for the emotional information processing which is triggered by social attitudes,posterior cingulate cortex is responsible for positive emotions processing which is triggered by positive social attitudes,the former and middle cingulate cortex is responsible for the negative emotion processing which is caused by negative social attitude.The study is the first time to explore that the different social attitudes impact the neural mechanisms of creative ideas geration and discover that social attitudes is good for the subsequent the generation of creative ideas,which is closely related with two neural composition activities,the one is the left hemisphere inferior frontal gyrus(BA47)and the other is posterior cingulate cortex(PCC).On the one hand,the discovery provides new ideas and contribution to the neural mechanisms of social attitudes and creative research;On the other hand,the discovery provides a new tools to creative ideas by social attitude evaluation,which is very important for to improving individual's creative activities.