Creative mood swings: divergent and convergent thinking affect mood in opposite ways

Abstract

Increasing evidence suggests that emotions affect cognitive processes. Recent approaches have also considered the opposite: that cognitive processes might affect people's mood. Here we show that performing and, to a lesser degree, preparing for a creative thinking task induce systematic mood swings: Divergent thinking led to a more positive mood, whereas convergent thinking had the opposite effect. This pattern suggests that thought processes and mood are systematically related but the type of relationship is process-specific.

Fig. 1

Mood (a) and subjective physical arousal (b) as a function of creativity task (divergent thinking = DT, convergent thinking = CT), activity (performing and preparing the creativity task), and timepoint (before vs. after preparation or performance of the creativity task)