Drinking tea improves the performance of divergent creativity

Abstract

Previous research has found that tea improves performance on convergent creativity tasks, such as the Remote Associates Test, by inducing a positive mood. However, there is no empirical evidence regarding the effect of tea drinking on performance in divergent creativity tasks. Using two experiments, the current research investigates the relationship between tea consumption and divergent creativity. In both experiments, participants were randomly assigned to two groups and implicitly manipulated to drink tea or water. In experiment 1 (N = 50), we used a block-building task as a measure of divergent creativity in spatial cognition. The results showed that the participants who drank tea performed better in the spatial creativity task assigned in the 10 min immediately following tea consumption than did those who drank water. In experiment 2 (N = 40), we adopted the restaurant naming task as a measure of divergent creativity in semantic cognition. The results showed that the participants who drank tea received higher scores in the semantic creativity task compared to those who drank water. The current research demonstrates that drinking tea can improve creative performance with divergent thinking. This work contributes to understanding the function of tea on creativity and offers a new way to investigate the relationship between food and beverage consumption and the improvement of human cognition.