Affective valence moderates the influence of thinking style on insight problem solving: Electrophysiological evidence

Abstract

The present study examined whether affective valence moderated the influence of holistic and analytic thinking styles on insight problem solving by analysing event-related potentials (ERPs). Adult participants were screened and assigned to holistic-thinking and analytic-thinking groups, 22 participants per group. They completed the insight task. The results indicated that in the initial stage of insight, the positive affect elicited larger N1 amplitudes than the negative affect in the analytic-thinking group. Moreover, for the holistic-thinking group, positive affect elicited larger P2 amplitudes than negative affect. In the subsequent stages, negative affect elicited larger N300–500 and late components than positive affect in the holistic-thinking group. In contrast, positive affect elicited larger N300–500 and late components than negative affect in the analytic-thinking group. These findings suggest that holistic-thinking individuals with negative affect and analytic-thinking individuals with positive affect were more able to abandon mental sets and reconstruct novel mental representations.