Romantic Love Stimulation and Creative Thinking: Evidence from Two Experimental Studies

Two studies were conducted to test the effect of passionate love on creative productions. In both studies, participants were assigned to one of two experimental conditions: in one condition, love was evoked in the beginning of the experiment and in the other condition, love was never evoked during the session. In the first study, participants were free to create stories about any topic they wanted whereas in the second study, they were instructed to only create stories on the topic of love. Creativity was assessed though divergent and convergent thinking tasks that consisted of writing original stories and both experiments ended after the participants answered Positive and Negative affect Scales and the Passionate Love Scale measuring respectively emotional and romantic states. The results of the first study showed that evoking love was detrimental to creativity in both divergent and convergent tasks. Overall, passionate love tended to have a negative effect. Participants in love in the experimental condition were evaluated to be less creative than those not in love in the control condition. In contrast, participants in love the second study for whom the topic of love was evoked showed better performance on the divergent thinking task than controls who were not in love. All participants had similar performances on the convergent thinking task. When comparing the results obtained with the two studies, passionate love showed a greater effect on divergent thinking than convergent thinking. Theoretical implications about the relationship between passionate love and creativity are discussed in this article.