Motivation And Unconscious Thought:Promotion Focus Is Beneficial To Unconscious Thought Processing Information

In traditional view,thought as a higher cognitive activity of human beings,belongs to conscious category.But studies have shown that thought can take place not only in the unconscious,but also in the solution of some complex decision making problems,the processing result of unconscious thought is superior to conscious thought.In addition to the field of decision making,researchers also found the superiority effect of unconscious thought compared with conscious thought in the field of creative problem solving.The results of creative thinking in unconscious thought are better than those in conscious thought.Studies also have shown that Unconscious thought is driven by motivation.Without motivation,unconscious thought can not be carried out.However,the motivation are divided into the promotion focus and prevention focus.Compared with the individuals who activated prevention focus,the individuals who activated promotion focus are more open to information.Then,compared to the unconscious thought under the prevention focus,is unconscious thought under the promotion focus more conducive to solving the problem of creativity? In this study,the research paradigm of unconscious thought was adopted to investigate the problem systematically.In experiment 1,we first presented a creative question to the subjects.Then the subjects were divided into three groups.The conscious thought group was asked to think carefully about the use of the brick;the unconscious thought group under promotion focus was asked to recall the desire and finish a maze task of the mouse to eat the cheese;the unconscious thought group under prevention focus was asked to recall the responsibility and finish a maze task of the mouse dodging.Finally,all the subjects were asked to write the use of the brick.The results of the experiment showed that the novelty and fluency scores of the use of the brick of the unconscious thought under the promotion focus condition was significantly higher than the prevention focus condition.In order to avoid possible conscious thought during the recalling task,in experiment 2,we activate the promotion or prevention focus of the subjects through a more rigorous paper-pen maze task.The results of the experimentshowed that the novelty and fluency scores of the use of the clip of the unconscious thought under the promotion focus condition was significantly higher than the prevention focus condition.Both experiment 1 and Experiment 2 used Alternative Uses Task in creative tasks.In Experiment 3,the Remote Association Task(RAT)was used.The results showed that,compared with the prevention focus,the unconscious thought under the promotion focus was more likely to get the RAT answers in the implicit level.The above results show that compared with prevention focus,unconscious thought under promotion focus condition is more conducive to the solution of creative problems.