Effects of positive affect and humor on divergent thinking

Abstract

We replicated prior findings that a positive affect induction can improve creative performance (Baas et al., 2008) relative to a neutral control condition. We also tested whether humor improved creativity relative to both positive and neutral affect conditions. Participants were randomly assigned to either a positive, humor, or neutral affect induction condition with sets of ten memes as the mood induction stimuli. They were subsequently asked to complete two randomized divergent thinking creativity tasks. Compared to participants in the neutral condition, those in the positive affect condition generated significantly more creative ideas. The number of ideas generated by those in the humor condition did not differ from the number ideas in the positive affect condition. Implications and future directions are discussed.