Abstract
It is commonly assumed that positive mood improves human creativity and that the neurotransmitter dopamine might mediate this association. However, given the non-linear relation between dopamine and flexibility in divergent thinking (Akbari Chermahini and Hommel, 2010), the impact of mood on divergent kinds of creativity might depend on a given individual's tonic dopamine level. We tested this possibility in adults by assessing mood, performance in a divergent thinking task [the Alternate Uses Task (AUT)], and eye blink rates (EBRs), a well-established clinical marker of the individual dopamine level, before and after positive mood or negative mood induction. As expected, the association between flexibility in divergent thinking performance and EBR followed an inverted U-shape function (with best performance for medium levels), positive mood induction raised EBRs and only individuals with below-median EBRs, but not those with above-median EBRs, benefited from positive mood. These observations provide support for dopamine-based approaches to the impact of mood on creativity and challenge the generality of the widely held view that positive mood facilitates creativity.
Highlights
It is commonly assumed that positive mood improves human creativity and that the neurotransmitter dopamine might mediate this association
Before assessing our three experimental hypotheses, we tested whether the experimental groups were comparable before the different moods were induced, whether the mood manipulation worked, and whether performance in the creativity task related to individual eye blink rates (EBRs) like it did in the study of Akbari Chermahini and Hommel (2010) [see Replication of Akbari Chermahini and Hommel (2010)]
There was not any hint to any pre-experimental difference between the two groups with respect to either the positive or negative subscale of PANAS, and the hedonic valence scores computed from the MI1, nor did any of these scales correlate with EBR1, all ps > 0.05
Summary
It is commonly assumed that positive mood improves human creativity and that the neurotransmitter dopamine might mediate this association. Given the non-linear relation between dopamine and flexibility in divergent thinking (Akbari Chermahini and Hommel, 2010), the impact of mood on divergent kinds of creativity might depend on a given individual’s tonic dopamine level We tested this possibility in adults by assessing mood, performance in a divergent thinking task [the Alternate Uses Task (AUT)], and eye blink rates (EBRs), a well-established clinical marker of the individual dopamine level, before and after positive mood or negative mood induction. Ashby and colleagues (1999) suggest that improved mood states are accompanied by phasic increases in dopaminergic supply provided by frontal and striatal pathways These phasic increases might facilitate switching from one task set or item to another, thereby increasing cognitive flexibility in creativity tasks. If we take EBRs as a marker of the current dopamine level (presumably integrating tonic and phasic levels), this has a number of rather serious implications that we set out to test in the present study
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