Every rose has its thorn: When negative affect leads to creativity

Abstract

We examined if and how negative affect leads to creativity. Building on mood- creativity research, and the view that a dynamic interplay of negative affect and positive affect fosters creativity, we focused on the core self-regulatory processes that down regulate negative affect and up regulate positive affect. Self-relaxation, the ability to down regulate negative affect effectively, and self-motivation, the capability to up regulate positive affect, are both used to examine the relation between negative affect and creativity. Individual differences in these self-regulatory processes are expected to influence the link between negative affect and creativity. We conducted three studies to examine our hypotheses. One experimental study which demonstrated an interaction of negative affect and self-relaxation on creativity, an experience-sampling study that explored the relationship in a work environment, and an experimental studied which showed the interaction between negative affect and self- relaxation and between negative affect and self-motivation. We find that negative affect enhances creativity when an individual is able to down regulate negative affect and is able to up regulate positive affect. Furthermore, we found a curvilinear relationship between self-relaxation and creativity as well as between self-motivation and creativity after a phase of negative affect. This finding shows that the effect of negative affect on creativity is moderated by self-relaxation and self-motivation. Moreover, we found that medium rather than maximum levels of self- relaxation and self-motivation were optimal for creativity in response to negative experience