The Influence Of Emotions With Different Motivational Strengths On The Solution Of Epiphany Problems

In recent years, it is a hotspot of research on creativity from the perspectives of affect, personality traits and so on. A large number of studies have shown that, not all forms of affect have a relatively unitary structure, and the mode of it's influence on cognitive processing is not completely consistent. In addition, there is also not general consensus on the effect of affects on creative problem solving for most previous creative problem solving studies have not considered the motivational intensity of affects. Therefore, with sweet dessert, pleasant scenery and threatened animals, polluted disease pictures, while body postures(reclining backward, leaning forward) accompanied by smile and frown facial expressions to elicit affects with disparate approach motivation, this study was to investigate the mechanism of affects on insight problem solving(Chinese character chunk task).The present study has employed thirty-five sweet dessert, pleasant scenery, threatened animals and polluted disease pictures, respectively, and twenty neutral pictures. Thirty-five participants were employed to assess the three dimensions(pleasure, arousal and motivational) of these pictures on a 9 type scale. The rating results showed that sweet dessert pictures have elicited high motivational intensity positive affect, pleasant scenery pictures have elicited low motivational intensity positive affect, threatened animals have elicited high motivational intensity negative affect, and polluted disease pictures have elicited low motivational intensity negative affect.The experiment 1 used Chinese character chunk task to explore the influence of positive affects on insight problem solving. Two sub-experiments were included. In experiment la, emotional pictures were employed to elicit positive emotions with high and low motivational intensity, between-subjects design were adopted and sixty-seven participants were randomly assigned to these conditions:high motivational intensity(34), low motivational intensity(33). In experiment lb, body postures(reclining backward, leaning forward) accompanied by smile facial expressions to elicit positive emotions with low and high motivational intensity, within-subjects design were adopted and thirty-eight participants participated in the experiment. The results suggested that, positive emotions with high motivational intensity hindered the tight chunk decomposition, whereas positive emotions with low motivational intensity facilitated the tight chunk decomposition and didn't show the promoting effect of the loose chunk decomposition.The experiment 2 used Chinese character chunk task to explore the influence of negative affects on insight problem solving. Two sub-experiments were also included. In experiment 2a, emotional pictures were employed to elicit negative emotions with high and low motivational intensity, between-subjects design were adopted and sixty-there participants were randomly assigned to two conditions:high motivational intensity(30), low motivational intensity(33). In experiment 2b, body postures(reclining backward, leaning forward) accompanied by frown facial expressions to elicit negative emotions with high and low motivational intensity, within-subjects design were adopted and thirty-three participants participated in the experiment. The results suggested that, negative emotions with high motivational intensity hindered the tight chunk decomposition task, whereas negative emotions with low motivational intensity facilitated the tight chunk decomposition task, there was no significant influence on the loose chunk decomposition task among these emotional states.In conclusion, the results shows that affect high in motivational intensity hinders insight problem solving, thus slows the tight chunk decomposition; while affect low in motivational intensity facilitates insight problem solving, thus accelerates the tight chunk decomposition; and there was no significant influence on the loose chunk decomposition among affect high or low in motivational intensity. The study introduced the motivational dimensional model of affect, and extends empirical studies with attention, memory, imagery, cognitive control, cognitive categorization processes to insight. The results is consistent with the previous work(the effects of affect on cognitive processes are modulated by motivational intensity), suggest that the effects of affect on insight problem solving are also modulated by motivational intensity.