https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-839X.00084

(Emotions and Creativity, East and West)

 

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0146167208323933

(The Dark Side of Creativity: Biological Vulnerability and Negative Emotions Lead to Greater Artistic Creativity)

 

https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/AMJ.2006.22798182

(The Effects of Emotional Ambivalence on Creativity)

 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103110001319

(Can expressions of anger enhance creativity? A test of the emotions as social information (EASI) model)

 

https://www.elgaronline.com/abstract/9781845426378.00015.xml

(Chapter 6: The Impact of Emotions, Moods and Other Affect-related Variables on Creativity, Innovation and Initiative)

 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074959780800054X

(Understanding the relationship between mood and creativity: A meta-analysis)

 

https://books.google.com.tr/books?hl=tr&lr=&id=zk14AgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA225&dq=emotions+and+creativity&ots=P4utXppmpn&sig=3JKDHE1D2X7P2sG1ZnQW69bdkzU&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=emotions%20and%20creativity&f=false

(Creativity Across Domains: Faces of the Muse)

 

Click to access 53f328510cf2dd48950c9519.pdf

(CREATIVITY, INTELLIGENCE AND EMOTIONS IN InnoEd)

This week I want to focus on types of emotions in order to understand the mechanism behind it. How do they get triggered, are they related with environmental factors, what is the process of getting into an emotional state and getting out from it, can they be easily controlled or is it impossible to ignore them in certain situations?

To find out more about these questions I checked some studies and charts that explain the system of emotions. I came across to a very clean website called “The Atlas of Emotion” which summaries the stages of emotions very well. The purpose of the Atlas is to make people aware of their emotions by knowing how they are triggered and how to respond to them. They believe that awareness itself is a strategy and base this project to Dalai Lama who claims, “In order to find the new world we needed a map, and in order for us to find a calm mind we needed a map of our emotions”. The idea is basically create a clear map for the emotions.

This is the chart that shows emotional episode timeline:

I want to briefly explain the components:

Pre- Condition: The context or situation before the emotional experience which can affect the emotional experience.

Event: The things that we encounter from the outside world or from our mind.

Trigger: Automatic appraisal matching to script in our database.

Perception Database: Our responses and individual emotional memories.

Physical Changes: Changes in our body, which occurs with the emotional act.

State: Emotion itself.

Psychological Changes: Approximate experience of the emotion.

Action: Emotional responses.

Post Condition: The result of the emotional action.

Here is an example of an alternative emotional process according to the Atlas of Emotions.

They are demonstrating the experiences on five basic universal emotions, which were being agreed by most researches. These emotions are fear, enjoyment, anger, sadness and disgust. Independent from where and how we are raised these five emotions are in common for all humans. However their intensity may change.

This clear structure of emotion map can help me to find connections between creativity and emotional status. For the later weeks I am planning to correlate these stages with the creativity process and examine how strongly connected they are.

The link of the “Atlas of Emotions” website:

http://atlasofemotions.org/

CREATIVITY & TALENT

I have been researching and explaining scientific experiments that have been made about the creativity for couple weeks. However I noticed that it is important to first separate creativity from talent as a concept since these two notions are usually perceived together. There is a moment throughout the creativity enhancement research where I came up with the idea of “you can’t teach someone to have creative talent”. I think this is exactly where I should define the differences of creativity and talent.

Stephan King has a powerful quotation about it, “Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.” Talent is something that people are born with. It is at some point has a genetic aspect. Otherwise it is impossible to explain a five years old boy playing a piano as a 50 years old experienced pianist. There is no such educational method that establishes this ability. On the other side, creativity is not an innate, God – given asset. But also it is not something that happens to you in one day. Creativity comes with a continuous hard work maybe lasts for days or even months. Therefore creativity can be improved with several methods. Innate talent can’t be thought but creativity can.

 

CREATIVITY & INTELLIGENCE

There is another concept that needs to be separated from creativity, which is: intelligence. For many years contradictory ideas were developed about the relationships between the creativity and intelligence. On a study that is done by Getzels and Jackson(1992), creativity and intelligence were founded to be largely independent traits. A few years after that Hasan and Butcher (1996) conducted another experiment concludes that these two concepts are so highly correlated that they were indistinguishable. This believe lasted for many years.

However today, the most common view is that intelligence level does not provide us any idea about the creativity of a certain person. The idea that the more intelligent individual has to be more creative is completely wrong. Examining the worlds one of the highly creative individuals like Edison, Einstein and Churchill can provide us answers considering they were experienced difficulties in school.

———–

Before I go further on my paper I wanted to clarify these concepts in order do develop a better understanding for creativity. After that I am planning to examine emotions and their affects deeply.

Last week I explained creativity as a concept and brought up some questions like whether it is a skill that comes naturally or can it be improved by the time. This week I want to show the different studies, opposite views and explanations about it.

Psychologists spend a huge amount of time trying to figure out the creative process, creative person and creative product. When people think about creativity, they tend to associate it directly with arts. However most researchers agreed on the idea that there might be different types of creativity. Donald N. MacKinnon has indicated three different kinds of creativity for his research.

Artistic Creativity: Related with the creator’s inner needs, perceptions and motivations.

Scientific and Technological Creativity: Deals with the environmental problems and produce novel solutions to them.

Hybrid Creativity: Related with the fields as architecture. Again produces a novel solutions and exhibits the personality of the creator.

 

Creativity Comes with Hard Work

Samuel’s study is rejecting the idea of creative skills come naturally and the creative works produced easily among creative ones. His research shows that in order to achieve creative experience a considerable effort and time has to be put into the project. The moment of insight happens after a long searching and observing period. This could take months or even years. According to Parnes & Harding it occurs at a much later time when it is least unexpected.

There is other studies that support the idea of creative imagination can be enhanced through environment or simply putting a lot of effort. One experimental study with children resulted that they become more creative when they engage more with creative content or watch others be highly creative. So they are suggesting if you want to write a masterpiece, making brainstorming sessions with other and taking courses about creative writing might help you coming up with new ideas.

Creativity Comes with Genes? 

Lets continue with the studies that suggest the opposite view. They are examining the link between the genes and creativity to find out whether creative people sharing a common gene that is inherited from family. I can say that nearly all the researchers studies the creativity genes accepts that there is definitely an environmental factor but as different from the others they don’t think it is an enough explanation. James T. Arnone says “Anyone who has played an instrument has heard the old colloquialism, ‘practice makes perfect.’ This is absolutely true, but we have to dig a bit deeper.” A 2016 study showed the links between genes that are involved with cognition and learning with musical phenotypes like listening, practice and aptitude. Another study revealed that the one particular cluster of genes is directly related to musical creativity. They say that there is much work to be done in order to figure out how all these components work together but it is clear that there is a heritable relationship.

Defining concepts;

CREATIVITY

There is no exact explanation of creativity among researchers. But the most common definition of creativity is ability to produce original and unusual ideas, or to make something new or imaginative. It is also suggested that there are two primary components of creativity: originality and functionality.

Originality: The idea should not be related with anything that exists before; it has to be completely new.

Functionality: The idea should include some degree of usefulness.

It is again a discussion topic whether creativity is an innate (natural-born) skill or not. According to a study made by observing the creative thinking processes of sets of twins, approximately 22 percent of the variance (in creativity) is due to the influence of genes. This leads us to conclusion of almost all people are born with the same level of creativity and it can be improved by training.

EMOTIONS

According to Paul Ekman there are six basic emotions. He classified them as: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise.

Later on Robert Plutchik introduced a different system for classification of emotions called “wheel of emotions”. This model showed that different emotions can be combined to create other emotions. For example combination of happiness and anticipation can create excitement.

Emotions vs Moods

I think it is also important to understand the difference between emotions and mood for this context. An emotion is likely to be short-lived, intense and have a identifiable cause. But a mood is lasts longer and usually doesn’t have a specific cause.

EMOTIONS AND CREATIVITY

 I want to examine whether there is a direct connection between emotions and creativity or not. If there is, how effective are emotions on creativity and are they positive or negative? There are quite different views about this subject. Here are some of them:

More Intense the Feeling Less Creative We Are

 According to a recent study done by Eddie Harmon-Jones, it doesn’t important if the emotions are positive or negative. What really significant is how intensive it is. Because to him, if an emotion is too intense, it narrows our focus and this diminish our creativity.

Positive Emotions Increase Creativity

 This research concluded that how a person is feeling does affect his or her creativity. What is different in this research is that it claims that the specific type of emotion (positive or negative) is also very important.

1.Feeling happy, upbeat or elated is associated with increased creativity.
2. Feeling calm, serene, and relaxed isn’t associated with either increased or decreased creativity.
3. Feeling anxious, uneasy, tense, or fearful is associated with decreased creativity.
4. Feeling sad, discouraged or disappointed, isn’t associated with either increased or decreased creativity.

So, to increase creativity we need to be in a positive emotional state and reduce the negative emotions.

Negative Emotions Also Spark Creativity

 Dr. Michael Parke explains that how negative emotions can also trigger creativity. He approves that positive feelings such as enthusiasm and excitement leads to a greater creativity since it enhance motivation. But he also claims negative emotions such as worry and anxiety or frustration increase creativity because they focus the mind and make you more critical.

Type of Emotion That Energize a Person

Some researchers have suggested that rather than looking at the influence of positive or negative emotions, the focus should be on which emotions energize a person to act. So that rather than making generalized assumptions we should examine which emotion trigger creativity for each person.

I was wondering about how emotions are effective on the creative process which leads us to produce art and design. It is known that many artist which go through hard times in their lives created the artworks that make them famous. On the other hand happiness and positivity is always related with productivity and I believe that it also has a strong effect on creative process. Thus my opinion is that, in terms of creativity the type of the emotion(happy, sad, anxious etc.) is not as significant as the intensity of that certain emotion. What makes the artwork more creative is related with the intensity of our current emotional status. 

After couple of research days I found many different studies with emotions and also creativity. My main idea did not change but I came to realise that emotions can be controlled. The thing that I never thought was that we are not always ruled by emotions, in fact we are the ones who have power to manage them. Considering that creativity process also can be directed according to what we want to produce. It is not a world that shaped only by coincidences and possibilities. So this realisation let me think from a different point of view. Even though the intensity of a current emotion important what we must know that we can turn that emotion into our own benefit.

I was wondering about how emotions are effective on the creative process which leads us to produce art and design. It is known that many artist which go through hard times in their lives created the artworks that make them famous. On the other hand happiness and positivity is always raleted with productivity and I believe that it also has a strong effect on creative process. Thus my opinion is that, in terms of creativity the type of the emotion(happy, sad, anxious etc.) is not as significant as the intensity of that certain emotion. What makes the artwork more creative is related with the intensity of our current emotional status. 

I made a several researches about this topic. According to many of them emotions can be both beneficial or detrimental to the creative process. One of the research paper is asking a similar question: “If being happy is key to coming up with creative ideas, how did all the eminent artists and scientists who are not known for being very cheerful manage to be creative?” Some researchers have suggested that rather than looking at the influence of positive or negative emotions, the focus should be on which emotions energize a person to act (Baas, De Dreu & Nijstad, 2008). They are also looking for how different emotions can be transformed and shaped for greater creativity.

Considering these informations what I want to search through on my paper is how can we benefit from emotions in order to increase our creativity.

 

Research links:

https://www.fundacionbotin.org/89dguuytdfr276ed_uploads/EDUCACION/creatividad/INGLES-artes%20y%20emociones/cap.1%20yale%202014%20Informe%20Creatividad%20EN.pdf

https://www.iep.utm.edu/art-emot/

https://hbr.org/2015/08/the-emotions-that-make-us-more-creative

I want to share my individual brainstorming process;

Subjects which are important to me:

• Emotions, what they are related with.
• Happiness,what is happiness and how to achieve it. 
• Art and design, producing art.
• Creative process and it’s stages.
• Things that trigger creativity.
• The relationship between art and happiness.

Possible outcomes:

Emotional status on the creative process of art.

The relationship between emotions and art production.

 

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton