This research comprises two studies investigating the impact of mood and cognitive stimulation on creativity, with a focus on the role of task type. The first study focused on idea generation, whereas the second explored slogan generation, revealing differing outcomes for distinct tasks. Positive and negative moods were induced through memory…

Anxiety-driven counterfactual thinking can be a slippery slope. Building on the premise that both positive and negative emotions can impact creativity, the present study examines how trait anxiety, optimism, and other mental health factors like therapy experience shape outputs in divergent thinking (DT) tasks. Using an online sample (N = 647), the…

Why can some people generate outstanding creative ideas despite receiving frustrating feedback? Although previous studies highlighted the effects of emotional states on creativity, the interactions between specific psychophysiological emotional parameters or affective states and response inhibition (RI) on creativity remain elusive. Therefore,…

This study aims to examine the impact of affective states and affective shifts on ideation and evaluation of creativity. Affects were induced by a two-stage imagination procedure of recalling autobiographical experiences. Three periods of divergent thinking were measured to represent the participants' creative ideation at different times. Creative…

An underexplored aspect of the relationship between analogical reasoning and creativity is its phenomenology; in particular, the notion that analogical reasoning is related to insight and its associated "aha!" experience. However, the relationship between these phenomena has never been directly investigated. We adapted a set of verbal…

This study investigated the impact of mild shifts in affective tone (i.e., pleasant vs. unpleasant) and arousal (i.e., high vs. low) on three creative processes. Undergraduates read short stories designed to induce affective shifts and then were asked to generate solutions to a complex business problem. Shifts in affective tone and arousal…

Conceptual combination is proposed as the mental activity by which imagination produces new ideas in creative processes. Two parallel forms of the imagination test were constructed based on conceptual combination theory. Each test comprises eighteen unrelated noun-noun pairs. For each pair, an original idea is required. The test-retest reliability…

The immersive method is a new concept of visual education that is better suited to the needs of students in contemporary post-industrial society. The features of the immersive method are: (1) it emerges from interaction with visual culture; (2) it encourages understanding of contemporary art (as an integral part of visual culture); and (3) it…

Reports a psychiatrist's analysis of Einstein's personal account of how he developed the theory of relativity. The psychiatrist cites Janusian thinking, actively conceiving two or more opposite concepts simultaneously, as a characteristic of much creative thought in general. (MA)