Mood-Altering Circumstances as a Way to Encourage Creativity of University’s Students

How you feel throughout the day greatly impacts your creativity, this is confirmed by research that has explored the creative output of participants under certain mood-altering circumstances. The actual study aims to respond to the question: Is there any difference in terms of creativity expression among students’ groups with different mood states in Albanian context? From the population of students of 1 year at Faculty of Social Sciences a random sample of 75 participants has been selected and has been randomly divided into three groups to be induced a positive, neutral or negative humor state. At first, a pre-assessment of mood state was done using PANAS questionnaire. Then, study participants were exposed to three different videos and after that, a post-assessment of mood state was conducted. In the final phase, the groups were presented with the same research task, which consisted in the appearance of an object (paper clip) and subjects were asked to list as many creative uses. The ANOVA analysis revealed that there was a significant difference (F (2,72) = 39.688, p≤.05) among groups about their creative ideas. Participants in good mood have the highest mean score of creativity (M=6.64, ds=2.361) compared with paticipants who self-reported a dominance of negative affect (M=4.20, ds.=2.309) and those experiencing neutral state of affect (M=3.32 ds.=1.547). Giving creativity a chance to flourish by altering mood is such an important issue that may have implications not only for institutions focused on learning/education but also for business world as well.