The angrier or the happier the more creative? The impact of anger and joy induction on creative problem-solving and...

In contrast to the conventional reasoning process that relies heavily on cognitive control, an individual's creativity may show an increasing trend when the cognitive control function is suppressed. A typical situation in which this occurs is low cognitive inhibition triggered by strong anger. In studies of the influence of anger on creativity, the creative tasks used were mostly divergent-thinking tasks, and few studies have compared the impact of anger and joy on general thinking and creative thinking directly. In addition to using an Alternative-Uses Task (AUT) that reflects divergent thinking, this study also adopted the matching routine and novel chunk-decomposition tasks to evaluate general and novel problem-solving, respectively. We also focused on the impact of angry and joy moods on creative tasks, comparing them with a control condition of neutral mood. The results revealed that the induction of an anger emotion promotes an individual's divergent thinking more than that of a joy emotion, and that both anger and joy are effective ways for creative problem-solving. Furthermore, anger reduced the reaction time while joy increased the accuracy rate to facilitate the creative problem-solving.