Abstract
Investigating the mood-creativity relationship in everyday life is important for innovation promotion in organizational management. This study explores the relationship between mood states and everyday creativity using two different measurement methods. Both the experience sampling method (ESM) and the day reconstruction method (DRM) were simultaneously applied to conduct a 15-day follow-up study of the relationship between 10 typical positive and negative moods and creativity in daily situations. In total, 31 corporate employees participated in the study. Participants reported their mood states and creativity at three time points per day by using ESM; they also recalled and reported their mood states and creativity for at least three major events per day at the end of each day by using DRM. In total, we collected 935 valid measurements from ESM and 1260 valid measurements from DRM. The results revealed that highly active, positive moods including happiness, concentration, feeling active and interested had significant positive correlations with creativity, while the low-activity, negative mood states of feeling tired and sleepy were associated with low creativity. Both DRM-based and ESM-based results were largely consistent in measuring individual’s mood states and everyday creativity. To our knowledge, this is the first study to conduct DRM for mood-creativity relationship. The high consistency between the two daily research methods provides further empirical evidence toward a comprehensive understanding of mood and creativity. As DRM imposes a lessened respondent load on the participants as compared to ESM, our results suggest DRM as a promising tool for further mood-creativity research.
Highlights
Creativity, the ability to engage in both original and practical production, has been described as the most important economic resource of the 21st century (Sternberg and Lubart, 1999)
Analysis of Matched Data Using the experience sampling method (ESM) and day reconstruction method (DRM) data that were matched with each other in terms of having the same participants and the event with overlapping time periods, we examined the correlation between the creativity and mood reported through each method
We investigated the associations between creativity and mood states in terms of the data obtained by the two different methods
Summary
Creativity, the ability to engage in both original and practical production, has been described as the most important economic resource of the 21st century (Sternberg and Lubart, 1999). In contrast to the popularity of ESM in creativity studies, another type of important daily research method, the day reconstruction method (DRM), has not been applied to measure the mood-creativity relationship to date. Creativity is a complex concept distinct from basic mood states for one thing and, for another, the mood-creativity relationship is a second-order measurement that have not been investigated using DRM, let alone its consistency with ESM. A comparison between the two daily measurement methods of ESM and DRM was conducted in the context of the mood-creativity relationship. Both ESM and DRM were simultaneously applied to obtain self-reported mood states and creativity from a group of corporate employees for 15 days. While a possible difference between the results from the two methods may reveal possible limitations for one of the methods and provide further clues to the understanding of the mechanisms on mood-creativity relationships, stronger conclusions can be made if the two methods yield consistent findings
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