Creative Mood Swings: Divergent and Convergent Thinking Affect Mood in Opposite Ways

Overview

Journal Psychol Res

Specialty Psychology

Date 2011 Jun 23

PMID 21695470

Citations 33

Authors

Soghra Akbari Chermahini

Bernhard Hommel

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

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.

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