Creative feelings

Research has found mixed effects of mood on creative problem solving. Here we examined the effects of mood on two components of creative problem solving; ideation and evaluation. After induction of positive, negative or neutral mood participants completed ideation and evaluation tasks. Results showed that a positive mood facilitates ideation whereas a negative mood facilitated evaluation. Persons in a negative mood set their criterion for usefulness of ideas higher than did those in a positive mood. This would lead to continued search for optimal solutions and improve performance on creative problem solving tasks in which the quality, rather than quantity, of solutions is important.